Hungary

Family, Child, Youth Association – established in 1993, as one of the first non-profit organizations in Hungary – aims to support the protection of children and the strengthening of families, accomplished by fortifying, training and providing services to helping professionals.

An important part of their activity is providing training in different mediation and conferencing techniques, including family mediation, victim-offender mediation, and family group conferencing.

Through its training, program development, consultancy, research and networking activities, the Foresee Research Group aims to contribute to the prevention and reduction of social inequalities; to promote the conceptual and methodological use of alternative conflict management; an objective assessment of the extent and forms of social exclusion; to reduce and prevent prejudice in society; and to promote the integration and equal opportunities of marginalised or disadvantaged social groups.

In Hungary, the Ministry of Justice is the professional governing body of probation services, whose tasks include victim-offender mediation and the implementation of certain community sanctions (probation supervision, community service).

The Ministry of Justice's department responsible for the probation field considers the promotion of the restorative justice approach and the application of restorative techniques in the criminal justice system to be a priority task. Our policy goal is to enable participation in restorative processes as widely as possible for persons affected by crimes and misdemeanours. To this end, the Ministry of Justice has established cooperation and is actively engaged in dialogue with other actors of the criminal justice system, the courts, the prosecutor's offices, the police, and attorneys, and lawyers.

Currently, in Hungary, mediators handle an average of 7,000 criminal and misdemeanour cases per year.