Present and Past Centre Activities

Last modified 2005-08-23 15:06

Publications. Centre staff members have prepared a number of written materials on restorative justice that are available for purchase. These range from booklets to books on restorative justice and key programmes of the Centre. In addition, Centre staff and associates are available to speak on restorative justice to any audience. They also regularly prepare articles for publication in popular and scholarly publications.

Seminar for Legal Community of Colombia. The Centre conducted a seminar for judges, prosecutors, legislators, and law professors on restorative justice. The Colombian constitution had recently been amended to require prosecutors to offer restorative justice to crime victims. The purpose of the seminar was to provide the officials with an overview of restorative justice and to suggest approaches for addressing this new constitutional obligation.

Umuvumu Tree Project. The Centre designed this programme to help Prison Fellowship Rwanda prepare prisoners accused of genocide to meet their victims, survivors and community members during that country's Gacaca hearings. Those hearings are expected to lead to eventual reintegration of most of Rwanda's 110,000 genocide prisoners into society.

UN Basic Principles on Restorative Justice. The Centre played a leading role in the creation of UN guidelines on use of restorative programmes in criminal justice. In addition to helping draft the guidelines, the Centre was instrumental in gaining Member States' support for their adoption by the UN Economic and Social Council.

Malta Prison Reform Project. Centre staff worked with government officials in Malta to design and implement a prison reform project. As part of this project, Centre staff assisted in developing a correctional training course, recruiting correctional guards, restructuring prison management, introducing furloughs, revising prison regulations and proposing victim-offender mediation.

Vision and Mission

The mission of the Centre is to develop and promote restorative justice around the world.

The vision of the Centre is that one day restorative justice will be the normal way of responding to crime throughout the world.

Centre Notes

Continuing Support for Restorative Justice by the United Nations

The United Nations continues to promote its basic principles on the use of restorative justice programmes, which it adopted in 2002. You may recall that PFI played a major role in the development and eventual adoption of these guidelines. Now, the criminal justice reform office of the UNODC (UN Office of Drugs and Crime) plans to publish a handbook for countries preparing to use restorative justice programmes in their criminal justice systems. This will be a practical guide for starting programmes and for linking them effectively to police, prosecutors, judges or prisons.

The UNODC held an expert meeting in Vienna at the end of January 2006 to review an initial draft of the handbook. Dan Van Ness, who participated in this meeting, reports that the handbook should be of practical value to PF national ministries as well as their governments.