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3 Restorative Just. 1 (2015)

handle is hein.journals/restjust3 and id is 1 raw text is: Restorative Justice: An International journal, 2015 Routledge Vol. 3, No. 1, 1-5, http://dx.doi.org/1 0.1080/20504721.2015.1049868 Toy s The politics of restorative justice John Blad Professor of Law, Erasmus University Rotterdam (The Netherlands), blad@law.eur.nl. O SIn October 2014 a workshop was organised in Leuven to explore the limits and the 1 potential of restorative justice (RJ) to address crimes, conflicts and injustices in intercul- 00 C) tural Europe.' The interesting and important papers that were brought to this workshop will be published in the near future and I will not discuss any of them here, but attending this workshop reminded me a lot of the debates I participated in around the abolitionist position of my mentor Louk Hulsman. One of the recurring questions evoked by the workshop discussions was that of the wisdom of remaining within the criminal justice system's language, while at the same time trying to exert effective, transformative influ- ence upon the criminal justice system. Would that choice not imply, in particular, that the potential of RJ to address and structurally change social injustices will not and cannot be realised? Hulsman, the famous Dutch critical criminologist and criminal law scholar, not only chose penal abolitionism because-while rejecting retribution for ethical reasons-he felt that punishment is not really achieving, and can never achieve, its proclaimed aims. He also chose it because he was convinced that the criminal justice system as such was functioning as a crucial, obscured political mechanism in the reproduction of fundamentally unequal and unjust societies. In his first abo- litionist paper (Hulsman, 1979) he mentions the fact that prisons are predomi- nantly filled with adult and young men coming in their great majority from the weakest socio-economic classes, ethnic minorities and abroad. The situation of these 'have-nots' is ultimately further deteriorated by the custodial sanctions imposed. 1 Convened by Ivo Aertsen and Brunilda Pali on 15-17 October 2014 as an Exploratory Workshop funded by the European Science Foundation. V 2015 Taylor & Francis

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