ABSTRACT
Almost exactly ten years ago, I wrote a chapter for a book evaluating the development of restorative justice in the Unites States of America and Canada and concluded that the criminal justice systems again managed to bury this unique, innovative, and ancient form of handling and solving conflicts (Weitekamp 1991). I gladly admit that I seem to have been wrong and only a year later, in 1991, I participated in a conference in Il Ciocco in Italy, at which some fifty international scholars discussed for the first time various forms of victim–offender mediation schemes all over the world. Ever since, many conferences and workshops have been held on the topic of restorative justice. That these meetings gain in importance can be seen in the fact that at the Tenth United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Treatment of Offenders, very successful ancillary meetings on restorative justice were organized.
