Navarre, the Basque Country and Catalunya proclaim themselves, with the Basque Institute of Criminology, to be “restorative territories as regards justice”

• Declaration by the autonomous ministries of Justice at the IVAC in San Sebastián
• “Doing justice today means attending to the victims’ needs and focusing on rehabilitation of those responsible for the crime”
• The Basque Country, Catalunya and Navarre stress the commitment to “make the shift from excessively retributive and punitive justice towards a more restorative, humanistic and democratic model of conflict management”

Donostia-St Sebastián, 21 11 2023

This afternoon, the Basque Country, Catalunya and Navarre defined themselves “as territories with long experience and tradition in the field of Restorative Justice and pioneers in the introduction of public policies backed by international standards in the matter”, and particularly by the Council of Europe Recommendation and the Venice Declaration signed by the Council of Europe. “Doing justice today means attending to the victims’ needs and focusing on rehabilitation of those responsible for the crime” they stressed.

This afternoon, at the St Sebastián University of the Basque Country campus in Ibaeta, the director of the IVAC-Basque Institute of Criminology Gemma Varona, instigator of the meeting, joined the Minister of the Interior, Civil Service and Justice and spokesperson for the Government of Navarre, Amparo López Antelo; the Consellera de Justícia, Drets i Memòriz de Catalunya, Gemma Ubasart; and the Basque Minister of Equality, Justice and Social Policies, Nerea Melgosa, to sign a statement based on the principle that “restorative justice represents a new approach in criminal justice, but also in other areas where harm and conflicts can occur”.

The event was attended by Ivo Aertsen, emeritus professor at the University of Louvain, Belgium, who was later named Member of Honour of the IVAC-KREI, and gave the opening lecture of the IVAC’s 2023/2024 year entitled “Another meeting without borders between the University and public policies on the application and development of restorative justice, in particular serious victimisation. Victims and penal justice systems: expectations and reality”.  

New approach

“Restorative justice represents a new approach in criminal justice, but also in other areas where harm and conflicts can occur. This is a more democratic and social approach, returning the leading role to those involved, including society as a whole, without prejudice to the guarantor nature of the legal agents” reads the statement signed by the three Ministers and the director of the IVAC.  

The document agreed to by the three ministries of justice stresses that “restorative justice is a justice closer to the lives of people and enables them to actively participate in dealing with the wrongdoer. The reparative effect in the victim is one of high personal value, but it also has a positive impact on society as a whole. An effect that is not found in ordinary criminal procedure where the confronted parties have little space to open a process of repair and, instead, the conflict and its negative effects predominate”.

“Judicialization of the conflict places the parties in a situation of confrontation and, in general terms, the judicial sentence neither has a positive effect on the trauma of the victim, nor does it change the erratic behaviour of the offender. We know that the expectations of the parties and of society as a whole are not, in general, satisfied” reads the text endorsed by Melgosa, Lopez, Ubasart and Varona.

“The participation of citizens in justice must be enabled and strengthened, fostering restorative responses that make it possible to articulate the principles of intention, solidarity, repair, accountability and pacification, without losing an interdependent focus in regard to the human rights of the victims and of the people investigated or condemned” highlights the agreement.

Rehabilitation

In keeping with this spirit, the three administrative departments have declared that “doing justice today means attending to the victims’ needs and focusing on the rehabilitation of those responsible for the crime”. The Basque Country, Catalunya and Navarre stress the commitment to make the shift from excessively retributive and punitive justice towards a more restorative, humanistic and democratic model of conflict management.  

For all of these reasons, they have agreed to “Work to foster the values and principles of restorative justice in order to generate a cultural and systemic change in the judicial field and, by extension, in society as a whole” and “To introduce effective public policies that foster the means available to the three administrations for the purposes of Restorative Justice in the criminal field, as well as in other areas, generating a cultural and systemic change in the broadest framework of policies on coexistence and justice”.

They also undertake to “promote stable services, with training and quality, backed by the public authorities, with sufficient financing, supervision and continuous evaluation of the results; to work on preventing the judicialization of conflicts by means of restorative community practices, defined as tools for prevention and non-judicialized conflict solving, and to promote social cohesion, seeking to generate collective conditions of trust, respect and care, and fostering peaceful coexistence among our communities.”

“We therefore understand that Restorative Justice will make a decisive contribution to developing societies that are more closely-knit, fair and reconciled, as the ultimate goal of all democratic public policies” ends the statement signed by the Ministers of Justice in the Basque Country, Navarre and Catalunya in Donostia-St Sebastián.