Principle Of Restorative Justice

2. What are the main principles underlying restorative practices? With examples, discuss Different restorative approaches and their suitability to conflict handling.

Introduction:
The most basic principles of restorative justice consist of voluntariness, respect, confidentiality, all-inclusiveness, participation, accountability, flexibility and responsibility. To describe about these principles at first we should know that what restorative justice actually is? So the general introduction or basic concepts of restorative justice and its main principles will be focused in my first part of essay.

Further, I will describe the different restorative approaches and their usefulness in conflict transformation and I will bring the examples of
These approaches also encourage peaceful expression of conflict, promote tolerance and inclusiveness build respect for diversity along with promoting responsible community practices (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime: 2006).

According to Gavrielides (2011) the restorative practices were dominant in ancient societies because they focused on the reparation to the person who was victim. In this case they didn’t much focus on making the offenders pay rather they focused in the interpersonal levels by focusing the reparation of the victim. Gavrielides (2011) further puts that restorative justice nowadays has completed its historical cycle and has come under the criminal justice agenda.

A flexible response to the circumstances of the crime the offender and the victim; a response to the crime which respects the dignity and equality of each person; a viable alternative to formal criminal justice system and an approach that solve the problem and address the underlying causes of conflict are the feature of the restorative justice programme (United Nation Office on Drugs and Crime:
These values are expressed by some writers like Sawatsky (2003), Van Ness, 2002, Braithwaite 2002, Moore and McDonald, 2000 in many different ways. Though expressed differently, these values revolve around the concepts like inclusion, democracy, responsibility, safety, reparation, healing and Reintegration (edited by Howard Zehr (2010article by Susan Sharp). What can be understood from all of these discussions is that “respect” for the feeling of all the parties seems to play a pivotal role in making Restorative Justice mechanism different from the traditional criminal justice system and other legal procedures. In this regard, Zehr (2002) opines that if he had to put restorative justice in a single word he would choose respect as the underlying principle of restorative