Restorative Justice: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen

Nils Christie warnte vor Fehlentwicklungen der Restorative Justice durch deren Erfolg, Expansion und Vereinnahmung. Insbesondere nannte er fünf Risiken der künftigen Entwicklung:  

One driving force behind the professionalization is the recent explosion in higher education. An increasing part of the population is taking high school or university exams, often of an unspecified type. This means that they are highly educated for tasks not yet specified. Mediation is an obvious possibility for future jobs. It is a territory not yet occupied, except by lawyers. Conflicts are the new land of promise, - entrepreneurs arrive, create training courses, establish firms, – and little by little a new profession comes into being, a profession of mediators. One more speciality. I warned against lawyers here in Sheffield 30 years ago, and called them professional thieves. They still are, but are now followed by a flock of top-educated generalists on the outlook for challenging tasks that may be possible to convert to paid work.

With growth come the bookkeepers. We need to know what goes on. And the bookkeepers need concepts for what they are counting. I met this problem in the very first annual reports from our state system for mediation in Norway. I met concepts as “offender” and “victims”, and also reports on cases “solved” or “not solved”. But this terminology goes against the central ideas in mediation. At the core of a mediative process lies the intention to bring variations in meanings up in the open, and thereby also open for changes in the meaning given to the acts by one or both parties.  

But my time is soon out. So also is the whole conference. I will therefore limit myself to an authoritarian provocation, claiming that the International Penal Courts represent a setback for the basic ideas of peace making and ideals of restorative justice. From the Nuremberg courts after World War II and up to the present UN penal courts for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, these courts have strengthened the idea that punishment is the only natural answer to atrocities, that impunity is unacceptable, and that some selected persons ought to receive a maximum of intended pain to make things right. International penal courts prevent us from seeing the conflicts in a broader and politically relevant perspective. They also prolong ongoing conflicts, as exemplified in Uganda just these days where “Britain has been accused of hindering attempts to end the 20 years civil war in northern Uganda by insisting that leading rebels be arrested and tried for war crimes”.  Similar problems appeared in conflicts inside the old Yugoslavia. International penal courts are also in danger of blocking the way for establishing commissions for peace and reconciliation. In the fight for human rights and decency, it is as if Amnesty International and other pressure groups willingly accept – and thereby give increased credibility to – those tools for pain-delivery they usually detest. Their flat acceptance of International penal courts is a setback for attempts to move conflicts from institutions for pain-delivery over to institutions for mediation.

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