Globalization and Restorative Justice: in the Thai Criminal Justice System

Jutharat Ua-amnoey*

Restorative Justice: History and Development
Restorative justice is an age-old concern, and has existed since ancient times. Van Ness (1986, p. 66) claims that:

Restorative Justice has been the dominant model of criminal justice throughout most of human history for perhaps all of the world's peoples. A decisive move away from it came with the Norman Conquest of much of Europe at the end of the Dark Ages transforming crime into a matter of fealty to and felony against the king, instead of a wrong done to another person, was a central part of the monarch's program of domination of his people.

However, development of this social phenomenon has only been revived as an important concept in the last 30 years. This development began in 1974 when Kitchener, Ontario, Canada established an experimental victim-offender reconciliation program for juvenile delinquents.

Throughout the 1980s and 90s, restorative justice programs were developed in North America, in many European countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, and Finland, in parts of Asia such as Malaysia and Singapore, as well as in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. The United Nations reported that by May 2001, 37 governments worldwide had responded.

Nowadays, restorative justice has been fully revived in the global society, and Europe has claimed that policies focuses on "the victim and the offender," had already begun in Europe by the late 1960s in the form of theoretical work by European scholars (Ivo Aertsen and Jolien Willemsens, 2001, p. 291). The first experiments, however, were set up in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada in 1974. The United States used diversion programs for juveniles in minor, nonviolent, and nonsexual crimes while in New Zealand instigated family group conferences for all youth crimes, except murder and homicide, which differed from the policy adopted in Germany and Austria, where in 1995 and 1996 about 70% of both adult and juvenile cases (43% for juvenile cases in Australia) were for violent crimes (Leena Kurki, 2000, p. 240). This idea has now spread all over the world and recently became one of the most important issues in the Tenth United Nations Crime Congress and has also been successfully proposed as one of the four workshops, named "Restorative Justice: Community Involvement, Diversion, and Other Alternative Measures, " in the upcoming the Eleventh Congress to be held on 17-25 April 2005 in Bangkok, Thailand.

4. Globalization of Restorative Justice Influences the "Non-profit International Organization" and "States System" Networks

The rise of restorative in Canada attracted a non-government network that runs parallel to the mainstream criminal justice system in the United States of America called "The Pioneer Group in Restorative Justice." Together with the Maclellam Foundation's supported (Daniel Van Ness, Vice President of Prison Fellowship International, Interview, 12 September 2003), this pioneer group was able to launch the first American restorative justice program in Elkhart Country, Indiana, in 1978 (Coates 1990; Leena Kurki, 2000, p.268). It can be seen, then, that the ideals of restorative justice are international and that its practice can be transplanted from one country to another, from Canada to the United States, to European countries, New Zealand, Australia, and to other countries around the world.

Van Ness and Strong (1997; Jennifer J. Lewellyn and Robert Howse, 1998) explained in-depth that restorative justice starts with a social movement. They explained that "one of these movements alone has lead to restorative justice theory, but all have influenced its development, if only because many who are now preoccupied with restorative justice came to it from one of [these1 perspectives. " Van Ness and Strong identify five such movements.

1) The informal justice movement emphasized informal procedures with a view to increasing access to and participation in the legal process. This movement focused on delegalization in an effort to minimize the stigmatization and coercion that resulted from existing practices.

2) Restitution as a response to crime was rediscovered in the
1960s. This movement focused on the needs of victims, maintaining that meeting the needs of victims would serve the interests of society more generally.