In recent weeks, Dr Marder was invited to speak, at four events across Dublin, to criminal justice policymakers, practitioners and other stakeholders about the new Council of Europe Recommendation CM/Rec(2018)8 concerning restorative justice in criminal matters. He received these invitations having worked as a Scientific Expert for the Council of Europe for 18 months from January 2017. There, he was responsible, alongside the Council for Penological Co-operation, for drafting the new Recommendation.
Firstly, on Friday 9th November, he spoke at an event organised by Restorative Practices Ireland at the National College of Ireland. Here, he presented the Recommendation to professionals from the education, local government and third sectors, focusing on its elements which pertain to the proactive applications of the restorative framework to the criminal justice system. For example, the Recommendation notes that restorative practices can be used to resolve conflicts and build relationships within prisons, between the police and local communities, and among criminal justice practitioners in their workplaces.
Then, on Tuesday November 20th, he was invited to present the Recommendation at an event organised by the Probation Service for International Restorative Justice Week 2018. This event also served as the official launch of the new Restorative Justice and Victims Services Unit within the Probation Service, set up to ensure that restorative justice was available more consistently across Ireland. The audience was primarily composed of probation and court professionals and, as such, he focused largely on the elements of the Recommendation which pertained to these contexts. For example, the Recommendation notes that restorative justice can take place in between guilty pleas and sentencing, occur within community sentences and be integrated into sentence planning work.
Dr Marder was also invited to speak at the annual Christmas Networking Meeting of the Association for Criminal Justice Research and Development (ACJRD). There, he spoke to a crowd of practitioners and policymakers from a variety of criminal justice agencies, noting the significance of the Recommendation to each agency and exploring how stakeholders across the system could come together to stimulate its implementation in a significant and systematic way. Finally, on January 22nd 2019, Dr Marder will also present the Recommendation to members of the Mediator’s Institute of Ireland.
At Maynooth University, Dr Marder teaches modules on policing, criminology and criminal justice, within which he teaches both restorative policing and restorative justice.