A Study on the Criminal Mediation System as Restorative Justice

Traditional criminal justice, which focuses on restoring social order through punishment for criminals, has a limitation in not fully considering the victim's damage recovery and the perpetrator's perception of responsibility. On the other hand, restorative justice focuses on coordinating conflicts and bringing about damage recovery and social reconciliation by voluntarily and actively participating in the process of solving crimes by perpetrators, victims, and communities. The criminal mediation system generally refers to mediation between perpetrators and victims in criminal cases, and in Korea, it was introduced as part of a pilot program in 2006 and has reached this point. Until now, discussions have been made to point out problems in the function and role of the criminal mediation system and to improve them, but the limitations remain that it has not been able to function properly as a part of restorative justice. Therefore, this study analyzes the criminal mediation system from the perspective of restorative justice, reexamines the limitations, and suggests institutional measures to improve them. First, in order to examine how the purpose and purpose of restorative justice can be applied to our criminal mediation system, the concept and historical development background of restorative justice were explained, and various types of restorative justice systems operated overseas were examined. In the operational status of the criminal mediation system, the procedure for operating actual criminal mediation was examined in stages, and the problems arising in this process and their limitations were analyzed. As a result, it was confirmed that there are various problems, such as insufficient voluntary participation of perpetrators and victims in the mediation process, lack of neutrality and expertise of mediation committee members, and lack of legal enforcement power of mediation agreements. Several improvement measures were proposed to solve these problems and allow the criminal mediation system to function as a truly restorative judicial law. Specifically, supplementary measures were proposed, such as establishing an institutional procedure for the parties to the case to participate in mediation according to their voluntary will by clearly understanding the purpose of criminal mediation before participating in criminal mediation, and stipulating legal grounds so that substantial adjustments can be made based on the neutrality and expertise of the mediation committee members in the criminal mediation process. Through this study, we hope that our criminal mediation system can play a role as a criminal justice system that practically achieves reconciliation and social integration between perpetrators and victims by faithfully reflecting the ideology of restorative justice in the future.