The Enforceability of the Victim – Offender Mediation Settlement in the Context of the Idea of Restorative Justice

Abstract

The European Union is committed to protect and establish minimum standards with regard to victims of crime. Directive 2012/29/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 October 2012 establishing minimum standards on the rights, support and protection of victims of crime. The Directive builds upon the key principle of the ‘role of the victim in the relevant criminal justice system’, so that any victim can rely on the same basic level of rights, regardless of their nationality and country in the EU in which the crime took place. The core objective of this Directive is to assume an individual approach to victims’ needs and to offer protection for victims of certain crimes, in particular, due to the risk of secondary victimisation. In this text, I am going to concentrate on the problem of enforcement of settlements reached in the presence of a mediator and to show samples of the results from qualitative and quantitative studies conducted in Łódź. The research aim is to show that the idea of restorative justice, in the light of the victim’s right to remedy of damage, when the settlement reached in the presence of a mediator is not performed, is fiction because it is only the perpetrator who benefits from the beneficial procedural effects of the settlement while the victim may be subject to secondary victimisation. I’d like to show a few important facts that should be taken into consideration when referring a case to mediation and when conducting a restorative justice process and current practice it in Poland.