Resolution

Restorative Justice (in the) Netherlands:

a valuable enterprise
In this article, criminologist and co-founder and project manager of
Restorative Justice Nederland, Anneke van Hoek considers the recent
history and development of restorative justice in the Netherlands.

The Walls of Jericho

In the early 1980s, a group of people marched around the

walls of one of the major prisons in the Netherlands. The
group consisted mainly of students and were led by Professor
Bianchi, a radical criminologist and Bible expert. This playful
manifestation, inspired by the Christian story of Jericho, was a
symbolic demonstration of Bianchis ideas: if your faith is strong
enough, the walls around the evil would collapse. The evil in
this case was the criminal justice system in general and prisons
more specifically. Bianchi was convinced that the criminal
justice system was causing significant humanitarian damage
and that it should be radically reformed.
I had the pleasure to study under Bianchis inspiring guidance.
I didnt always agree with him, but his radical views challenged
me to take a critical look at the existing criminal justice
procedures and institutions and evaluate my own beliefs.

Getting Real

After my graduation I worked for 16 years at a private research

and consultancy firm which mainly worked for the government,
and I learned about crime policy and crime prevention in
practice and how to evaluate and improve current practices. At
that time, restorative justice wasnt on the policy and research
agenda, since the topic was highly polarised and a no-go area
for Dutch government officials.
In 2001 I co-founded an NGO that works in the African Great
Lakes area and I learned about the gacaca (a system of
community justice) and other restorative approaches in Africa.
Some years later I became involved with the work of the
European Forum for Restorative Justice and met restorative
practitioners and scholars from all over the world whose
practical idealism inspired me.

Restorative Justice Nederland: a new start

in a changed political climate

In the Netherlands, the Forum for Restorative Justice was

started in 2000. They initiated the Dutch-Flemish Restorative
Justice Journal which has been a platform ever since for
in-depth academic discussions about restorative justice issues.
The Forum also set out to create a social movement to develop

awareness and stimulate the application of restorative practices

in the Netherlands. Ten years later, the original founders of the
Forum came together to evaluate their work. A decision was
made to give a new impulse to the work of the Forum, and a
foundation called Restorative Justice Nederland was created,
with myself and my old university friend Gert Jan Slump as
project managers. Since then things have moved fast, because
it turned out that this initiative came at exactly the right time.
The political climate had changed slowly over the years, partly
because of European laws and regulations which stimulated the
application of restorative justice within the European Union.
This led to the adoption of a new article in the Dutch Penal
Procedural Code in 2011 which created for the first time in
Dutch history a legal base for the application of mediation in
penal matters.

From ad hoc policy to a national framework

One of the first major assignments of Restorative Justice
Nederland was the request from the Ministry of Justice to do
an inventory of restorative justice projects and initiatives in
the Netherlands since the 1980s. This resulted in an overview
of a wide range of projects which had often been shut down
after a while because of policy change or other political or
practical reasons not based on the often positive evaluation
results. It was clear that the lack of a structural policy in this
area obstructed the development of a solid restorative justice
practice, so we advised the Ministry to create such a policy
framework.

A policy framework, Mediation in Penal Matters, was

subsequently drafted by the Ministry. This framework now
forms the basis of a variety of pilots in each decision making
phase of the criminal justice process (police, public prosecution,
judiciary) which will be executed in the coming year. One major
obstacle, however, is money. At this point, hardly any extra
funding is provided by the government to run these pilots and
facilitate and stimulate sound and diverse restorative practices.
Financial negatotiations are ongoing.

Putting victims needs first

Within the criminal justice theatre the main roles are played
by offenders and criminal justice professionals. Victims

Issue 48: Summer 2013

historically play only a small supporting role, if any at all. Over

the years, however, gradually more attention has been paid to
victims. The provision of information to victims has improved
and professionals have become more knowledgeable about the
importance of treating victims correctly.
In 2012 a new law was adopted strengthening the legal position
of victims. This might address the needs of some victims, but
as research indicates, not all victims are primarily interested in
receiving more legal rights - some have a need to meet their
offender in a different setting than the alienating context of a
criminal court. So far, discourse has been quite ideological in
character, and different politicians and movements all think
they know what victims want. The next step, in my opinion, is
to let victims speak and decide for themselves. More research
is needed to get a solid idea of the spectrum of needs and
wishes of victims, and the challenges they face once they enter
the criminal justice system.
A good example of such victim-led research is the transnational EU-funded project Restorative Justice in Europe:
Safeguarding Victims and Empowering Professionals in which
Restorative Justice Nederland is a partner1. The good news
is that this type of research is getting more popular in the
Netherlands, since all criminal justice institutions are required
by the Ministry to develop a vision on how their practices can
become more victim oriented.

Are the walls indeed tumbling down?

Recently a Ministerial Masterplan 2013 2018 for the prison

system in the Netherlands was published in which quite radical
changes were announced. The Masterplan proposes shutting
down no less than 26 prisons, laying off 3,700 employees and
replacing prison sentences with electronic home detention on
a large scale. Its part of a huge operation to cut the budget
of the Ministry and it has encountered a lot of resistance from
different areas. Magistrates accuse the Ministry of just trying
to save money without any vision and theyve come up with
an alternative plan. Prison directors and prison staff have
also collectively developed an alternative, and so has a group
of mayors. Discussions are flourishing about the purpose of
punishment and the resocialisation of offenders, and all of this
provides both risks and opportunities for the implementation
of restorative justice in the post-sentence phase.
Were living in interesting times, and its crucial that we
learn from other countries. Thats why Im happy to be a
partner in the trans-national project Restorative Justice in
Europe and a member of the European Forum for Restorative
Justice. I cherish good relations with other restorative justice
organisations abroad like the Restorative Justice Council -
together we can make a difference.
Anneke van Hoek
Restorative Justice Nederland

The Bijlmerbajes prison complex in Amsterdam, site of Professor Bianchi's march, is due to be demolished in 2016.
For more information on this project, visit www.rj4all.info/content/RJE