Dr. Ian Marder gives plenary presentation on international legal instruments to the European Forum for Restorative Justice’s 10th International Conference

Friday, July 13, 2018 - 12:00

On June 16th, Dr. Ian Marder was invited to participate in a panel on the development of international instruments in the field of restorative justice. This took place during one of the daily plenary sessions at the 10th International Conference of the European Forum for Restorative Justice (EFRJ) in Tirana, hosted by the Albanian Foundation for Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation of Disputes. Ian spoke about some of the most important provisions within the forthcoming Council of Europe Recommendation concerning restorative justice, which he has been helping to draft since January 2018.

The other panel participants included speakers from Austrian and Dutch universities, who spoke about the previous Council of Europe Recommendation and the European Union Victims’ Directive, respectively. They were joined by speakers from the Slovenian prison administration and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, who described the ongoing development of United Nations instruments in this field.

The panel concluded that the imminent publication of new international instruments gave researchers and practitioners in this field an opportunity to engage governments and criminal justice institutions across Europe and further afield. The purpose of this engagement will be to promote the implementation of restorative justice through capacity building, policymaking, pilot projects and the development of long-term national and institutional strategies on its use.

The conference also involved dozens of parallel workshops, including on topics such as drafting domestic restorative justice legislation, implementing juvenile justice codes in Georgia and Albania, developing values and standards for practice, and using restorative justice in prisons, inter alia. The EFRJ organises international conferences and summer schools on restorative justice in alternate years; there will be a summer school in 2019 in Gdansk, Poland, and the host country of the 2020 international conference will be determined in 2019 as well.

While in Albania, Ian also gave a guest lecture to master’s students at the University of Tirana’s Faculty of Law. This class introduced the theory and practice of restorative justice, and considered the opportunities within the new Albanian Code of Criminal Justice for Children to develop restorative justice in Albanian youth justice.

Ian’s reflections on the conference as a whole can be found here.