This article considers the fundamental restorative justice principles of voluntary participation, the impartiality of the facilitator and the confidentiality of the restorative process from the point of view of participants to victim-offender mediation in Flanders, Belgium. These principles have remained relatively theoretical; little is known about how they are perceived by the participants to restorative practices. Results of our study show that whereas victims and offenders unequivocally support the principles of voluntariness and impartiality, the principle of confidentiality causes dissatisfaction and frustration when they believe it hinders the judge trying the case in court from establishing the truth about the facts.

In this paper we compare the experiences of victims of serious violent crimes with a restorative intervention completed before or after a judicial decision was taken. Specifically, we ask: What is the impact of the availability of a judicial decision on the victims’ assessment of the restorative intervention? We conducted interviews with victims of violence in Belgium and Canada. The findings show that these victims are satisfied with a restorative intervention, irrespective of the phase in which this intervention takes place, provided that the intervention is complemented with a judicial procedure in which the offender is held responsible for his actions.

This article provides data about qualitative and quantitative research that was executed in juvenile detention centres in The Netherlands in the framework of the EU-funded Restorative Justice in Europe project. The results of a survey amongst 75 staff members are presented. Special attention is paid to the restorative handling of internal conflicts and crimes within the detention centre. Restorative Justice Nederland, executing this research, also developed a self-assessment tool for prisons, the Organisational Maturity Grid Restorative Practices, that can be used to assess how ‘mature’ restorative practices are within an organisation. Based on this maturity grid and the data of the research advice is provided on how restorative practices within juvenile detention centres can be brought to the next level.

This article presents the backgrounds of a particular restorative practice in Flanders: the Restitution Fund. This fund is meant to give a symbolic instrument into the hands of persons in custody, to send a message to the victim: they will do volunteer work in society (mostly: charity work). Victim offender mediation starts up and at the end of the project the victim will receive an amount of money. Although this project is an excellent example of a restorative justice practice, there is still a long way to go to get it embedded in a longer term policy framework.

In this short paper, a summarising report is presented on a two years action-research project (2011-2013) co-funded by the European Union on how to conceive and implement peacemaking circles in a European legal and cultural environment. In a first part of the paper, the background and reasons for implementing peacemaking circles are explained, and attention is given to their added value as compared to the models of victim-offender mediation and conferencing. After a short presentation of the action-research set-up in three countries (Belgium, Germany and Hungary), a selective list of critical issues is discussed as they have been experienced during the project: the selection of files and the preparatory phase of a peacemaking circle, the running of the circle meeting and the meaning of some of its operational principles (the role of the circle keeper, the function of rituals, the talking piece, the decision making process, …). Also the involvement of the community at its different levels - from the community of care to the macro-community - is discussed, as well as how the direct conflict parties experience the presence of these communities. A general conclusion is that a model of peacemaking circles can be implemented in a European context effectively, but developing a methodology on how to involve members of the wider community remains a challenge.