Samenvatting

Restorative justice focuses on doing justice after the occurrence of an offence. It gives priority to deliberative encounters as the best way of achieving restoration. The ambition of the maximalist option of restorative justice is to modify the punitive apriorism in criminal justice into a restorative apriorism. One of the challenges is to unravel the socio-ethical and political intuitions that orient the option for restorative justice. Restorative justice is first of all an option based on socio-ethical considerations: aiming at restoration instead of accepting the punitive premise, and giving full space for deliberation processes among stakeholders instead of imposing a top down decision procedure. These social ethical grounds of restorative justice have a potential contribution to improving the quality of our democracies.