On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the restorative justice movement in Russia

This article examines the controversial period of emergence and development of restorative justice in Russia. This domestic experience is compared with the modern European understanding of restorative justice and its fundamentals. It is acknowledged that our country has an interesting experience of restorative justice, documented in the Restorative Justice Herald and other documents, which we can be proud of thanks to the actions of a team of like-minded people in more than 30 regions of the country. But there are also difficulties. The attitudes towards restorative justice on the part of the authorities, law enforcement agencies and academia are analyzed. Attention was paid to the discussion of the model legal regulation of the concept of reconciliation in criminal proceedings, which took place on April 22, 2022 at the Department of Criminal Procedure of the North-West Branch of the Russian State University of Justice. As the social response of civil society to crime, restorative justice is based on fundamentally different principles from state governance. Such work requires a fundamentally new way of thinking and working. It is concluded that restorative justice in Russia is wrongly restricted. Comments are made on the model of legal regulation of conciliation in criminal proceedings from the perspective of the essential nature of restorative justice.