In October 2023, the Council of Europe invited Dr. Ian Marder to speak at an international conference in Tbilisi, Georgia. The conference, entitled The Role of Restorative Justice in Criminal Matters, heard two days of presentations from Georgian officials and criminal justice professionals, and experts from international governmental organisation and universities.
The conference was organised in light of significant progress in the use of restorative justice in youth diversion in Georgia, the growing desire to expand this approach to Georgia’s adult criminal justice process, and the broader interest in the development of restorative justice in Eastern European and Central Asian countries.
Ian delivered three plenary presentations. On the first day, he spoke about the criminological rationale and international approaches to offering restorative justice as a diversionary process for adults in criminal justice. On the second day, Ian first discussed the implementation of international legal frameworks, focusing on provisions relating to the accessibility of restorative justice services, cultural change in criminal justice institutions, and inclusive approaches to implementation. Finally, he presented on international standards for professional training for restorative justice facilitators.
In September 2023, Ian travelled to Edinburgh to build links between criminology at Maynooth and Edinburgh Napier University. While there, he delivered two workshops. The first, organised by the Scottish Institute of Policing Research and hosted by Edinburgh Napier University, focused on how to build relationships between police officers and members of minority ethnic communities. Attended by police officers, researchers and civil society, the workshop heard research findings from a recent project using restorative practices to achieve this in Ireland, and reflected on how similar approaches might be applied in Scotland. The second workshop, organised and hosted by Community Justice Scotland and attended by professionals from a range of justice and non-profit sector organisations, considered what it means to work restoratively within a community-first approach to justice.
Also in September, Ian organised an online workshop in collaboration with the Restorative Justice Pedagogy Network and the Restorative Justice: Strategies for Change project, as well as NGOs Why me?, Transform Justice and the European Forum for Restorative Justice. This was the first in a new series of workshops on interdisciplinary learning for justice reform and education.
This event, entitled Reframing restorative justice – a workshop for advocates and educators, brought together 90 participants from almost 20 countries to learn about the concept of reframing and how it applies to restorative justice. Colleagues from Transform Justice spoke about their research which aimed to understand how criminal justice reform could be communicated to build public support, before colleagues from Why me? discussed a similar, ongoing study they are leading to explore the impact of different framings of restorative justice on criminal justice professionals’ support.