Partners: Rondpunt, KULeuven, Moderator, Leuven Institut for Criminology, European Forum for Restorative Justice
Coordinator: Moderator
Founder: Justice Program of the European Union
Summary: Road Traffic Offences (RTO) occur quite regularly. In 2015 more than 1 million road crashes occurred in Europe. More than 26.000 individuals lost their life in a car crash. For every deceased individual, four persons are permanently injured, eight persons suffer serious injuries and fifty persons suffer from minor trauma. The impact of a car crash widens to families, friends, colleagues, classmates, neighbourhoods, communities and society as a whole.
The starting point of this project is the EU-Directive 2012/29/EU, establishing minimum standards on the rights, support and protection of victims of crime. This directive provides rights to all victims of crime, including victims of road traffic offences.
Restorative Justice (RJ) in road traffic offences is one of the pillars of this project. Regarding RJ-practices, the directive obliges member states to guarantee some specific rights of victims. However, RJ-practices for road traffic offences are applied only in a limited and partial way in EU member states.
Restorative justice practices, such as victim-offender mediation, make dialogue and mutual understanding possible in cases where persons involved in intentional or unintentional road traffic offences do not start a spontaneous communication process. Restorative justice practices can contribute to the rehabilitation of both victims and offenders involved in road traffic offences.
Objectives: The first aim of this paper is to further discover and share needs and outcomes of victims and offenders regarding RJ-practices after road traffic offences. A second aim is to present some good practices that might be inspiring for other countries or existing RJ-practices.
