On Saturday, the Conference of the Restorative Justice in Contemporary Criminal Policy was concluded in the Dead Sea region in southern Jordan. The Conference was held from 19 to 21 and organized by organized by Naif Arab University for Security Sciences (NAUSS) and the Jordan's Public Prosecution Office.
The conference recommended focusing on spreading the concepts and ideas of restorative justice and demonstrating its ability to achieve reform and prevention, and paying attention to field studies of the criminal phenomenon.
The 3-day conference was held under the sponsorship of His Majesty the King of Jordan, Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein, as 10 Arab attorney generals and international bodies participated.
It called for the preparation of a draft guiding model law for restorative justice in criminal issues in accordance with international standards and for the inclusion of legal higher education curricula, judicial institutes, police academies, and restorative justice concepts. This is to re-instill the values of reconciliation and their applications in the criminal justice systems.
The Conference recommended that victims should be involved in restorative justice options, taking into account their material and moral needs when applying that justice. It affirmed the need to exclude the serious crimes that undermine the security and stability of societies from the scope of restorative justice.
The Conference also concluded with a recommendation to hold restorative justice conferences on a regular basis in order to further enrich the relevant scientific aspects, and to disseminate the Conference's outputs and its recommendations to the Arab attorney generals. NAUSS has been adopted as the scientific and technical partner for the Arab Association for Prosecution.
More than 400 members of the Arab public prosecutions and the Public Prosecution Office in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have participated in the conference. A number of Arab experts and specialists in the field of restorative justice and representatives of many international organizations have also participated in the conference.