RJ City - a new way to explore restorative justice
by par Nicholas Jesson

Signed articles do not necessarily represent the opinions of "Ecumenism in Canada" or the Prairie Centre for Ecumenism.

Les articles signés ne représentent pas nécessairement les avis de "Oecuménisme au Canada" ou le Prairie Centre for Ecumenism.

There are numerous innovative resources available on the internet. Today we encourage you to explore RJ City, a website that seeks to be "an adventurous and perhaps audacious attempt to imagine a city of 1,000,000 responding as restoratively as possible to all crimes, all victims and all offenders." RJ is shorthand for restorative justice, an approach to justice that seeks to restore the relationships broken by criminal behaviour. "Restorative justice is a broad term which encompasses a growing social movement to institutionalize peaceful approaches to harm, problem-solving and violations of legal and human rights." [Wikipedia] Numerous examples of restorative justice are described on this website, and elsewhere on the internet. Perhaps the most familiar form to Canadians is the use of Aboriginal sentencing circles.

The new RJ City website descibes itself as "a research and design project created to explore what seems to be a gap between the claims that restorative justice offers an alternative approach to conflict, crime and justice on one hand, and the rather limited use of restorative programmes in most countries on the other." The RJ City website is part of a larger project undertaken over five years ago. The website gives details of the various stages of the project and invites your participation and feedback. The project is sponsored by Prison Fellowship International.


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Posted: March 15, 2007 Transmis : 15 mars 2007
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