The road to reconciliation. Criminal restorative justice in Hungary

A büntetôjogi helyreállító igazságszolgáltatás magyarországi története

Abstract

This paper presents the story of restorative justice, concentrating on its history in Hungary. It follows the antecedents of restorative justice from the Árpád era to 2007. During my research, I found traces of community involvement and third-person application in the early days in Codex of Csemegi, a pro-punishment code. Therefore, the Codex concentrated on the offenders. The possibility of diversion wasn’t included in it. In socialism, there were social courts. I believe, that it was the antecedent of penal mediation in Hungary. The community was an active actor, but victims were forced into the background. The focus wasn’t on conflict resolution. We introduced the conditional suspension of the prosecutor. It was an opportunity for individualization, but it was rarely used. Ultimately, we introduced the penal mediation in 2007, because it was an EU obligation. If I would like to summarise my complex view on this topic, I can fix that, there is criminal mediation in Hungary, but we use it occasionally. This paper summarises the reason for this.