Restorative justice as a horizon of possibilities for the Colombian transitional process

Abstract

During the most recent three decades, restorative justice has emerged as a new paradigm to address the problem of prosecution, in particular, of crimes committed in contexts of massive human rights violations. The center of the new perspective is the rights of victims and the question of more adequate mechanisms and practices than the traditional ones to recompose the social relations broken by the conflict and attend to individual rights in alternative ways to those proposed from the retribution paradigm. of criminal law. The research that supports this article was based on the identification of two challenges arising from interviews with various actors, both from groups of victims and with officials from the Special Peace Jurisdiction. On the one hand, the challenge of the dogmatic construction of restorative justice and, on the other, to identify the keys to its pedagogy and desirable social appropriation. In this way, we undertook the assembly of the theoretical currents that inform exits to conflicts from the restorative approach, with the most conspicuous problems derived from the punitive paradigm shift, as well as the possible alternatives that the victims consider fit to a framework of acceptability reasonable and consistent with their claims for justice. Finally, the article focuses its proposal on the collective construction of relational goods as a plausible alternative to consider in the developments and in the attention to justice claims in transitional contexts.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.21017/Rev.Repub.2020.v28.a79