About Project
CROSSING PROTECT moves from the European Commission decision to revise the EU Directive 2012/29, the so-called Victim's Right Directive establishing minimum standards on the rights, support and protection of victims of crime in Member States and from need to include more comprehensive provisions on restorative justice services in this new legal framework.
The Directive addressed the Restorative Justice services (Art. 12) as framework where safeguard the victim from any secondary and repeat victimisation, intimidation and/or retaliation. Another important point of the Directive revision is the provisions on the training of practitioners (Art 25) stating that Member States shall encourage initiatives enabling those providing victim support and restorative justice services to receive adequate training to a level appropriate to their contact.
Since 2012 to now, not all the Member States have been ensured the same implementation level of the EU Directive 2012/29 on victims’ rights because of the very different criminal justice systems and the Directive is currently under revision by the European Commission. The Directive has been a crucial milestone not only for promoting victims’ rights, but also to reflect about the potential of restorative justice to respond to the justice and safety needs of victims.
Access to justice, provision of high-quality services, interagency cooperation and good practice standards promoting the needs of all those involved in the aftermath of violence and crime are the key working areas of CROSSING PROTECT, in line with the chapters of the Directive.
Thus, CROSSING PROTECT wants to propose four main pillars on which to base the revision:
- Removing barriers to access restorative justice services to guarantee effective and equal access to all victims of crime who freely wish to participate in a restorative justice process
- Ensuring safety of victims through high-quality service delivery to minimise any harm caused to victims and maximise potential benefits in the course of the restorative justice process
- Complementarity and effective cooperation between victim support and restorative justice services as coherent and integrated system of service provision at national level
- Neutrality of restorative justice services ensuring a balanced approach towards victims and offenders
CROSSING PROTECT main objectives are:
- To build new skills for the partners’ organisations of the Restorative Justice and of the Victim Support systems to work transnationally and across their sectors by addressing their main common needs and the cross-cutting priorities
- To drive transformation and change in the partners’ organisations by implementing a tailored and innovative peer-to-peer capacity building programme to increase RJ/VS trainers’/operators’ capacities, to capitalise experiences and to create new working synergies between the two systems
- To increase the quality in the work, activities and practices of the partners’ organisations by opening up to new approaches not naturally included within one sector, thus establishing a positive interaction and a systemic cooperation between the RJ/VS systems
FROM PROTECT TO CROSSING PROTECT
CROSSING PROTECT is mainly based on the experience of the former Erasmus+ KA2 project “PROTECT” granted by the Erasmus+ Italian National Agency (INDIRE) in 2020.
PROTECT created a peer-learning community where practitioners belonging to Restorative Justice (RJ) and Victim Support (VS) systems find a neutral place for the exchange of practices and knowledge but. By participating in the project, the two main Europe Networks representing Restorative Justice (European Forum for Restorative Justice) and Victims’ rights Support (Victim Support Europe) started a common reflection on the most effective way to promote synergies among two systems often operating in parallel when have to manage disputes’ resolution but without any effective operational cooperation between their actors.
However, PROTECT scope was just referred to the exchange of European good practices and it missed to give a systematisation to the same training practices implemented so now, CROSSING PROTECT wants to go further and to achieve the creation of a common methodology and of a common training model able to cross the systems in order to create the right framework for a stable inter-systemic referral cooperation between RJ and VS systems.
CROSSING PROTECT will make the best use of the lessons learnt during the past experiences, it will capitalise that expertise already developed by partners’ organisations and it will give a complementary and cross systemic approach to the organisation of tools and guidelines that will serve as basis to set the framework of the common training model for the permanent inter-systemic cooperation approach between RJ and VS systems.