Violence, Criminality and Human Rights: From Restorative Justice to the Dignity of the Human Person

Globalization generates a network of power and control over the importance that knowledge and information have in a world context. With that in mind, in a post-modern society, with pluralities and yearnings, there’s a need to regulate, through norms, the appropriate behaviors to the social coexistence. The control aims to shape, through mechanisms, the acting exercise to avoid the misbehavior of a conduct, such as crime. An example might be criminal law, which’s goal is to protect the fundamental rights of the individuals and society’s, basing itself over a criminal policy of protection of said fundamental rights. Insofar, in a transforming society, the conduct’s deviations are inevitable, and, as a consequence, the criminal conflict. Aside from that, despite society’s reliance’s over a retributive and verticalized criminal justice, violence and criminality have increased in a considerable way decharachterizing on how one deals with crime, if the punishment fits the crime, or if that’s enough to maintain social order. Therefore, it was inevitable to criate a criminal justice model that brings efficient and adequate results to combat criminality. On that note, Restaurative Justice’s arises as a new way to analyze crime, based on dialog, change, prevention, and, most of all, on the respect to human dignity. Restaurative Justice’s purpose is not the crime, per se, but the individual and social’s consequences as well as the relations between the actors (victim, perpetrator, community). From that premise, the model of criminal justice utilizes a participative democracy to emphasize the benefits of consensual resolution, from the minimum intervention to the development of Restaurative practices to offer a response to the crime based on human dignity, equity and social harmony, proposing not the substitution of the system, but a complement to the effectiveness of justice and human rights.