Restorative Justice in Gender-based Harms: Reflections from Nepal

Ram Tiwari is the President of Nepal Institute of Justice, a non-profit organization working to promote and establish restorative justice system in Nepal. Ram has been working in the fields of conflict transformation and justice since 2007. Specifically, since 2013, which he believes to be a "second inning" of his life, he has been working solely to establish restorative justice in Nepal as a more humane alternative to the current punitive and adversarial justice system.

Nepal’s laws allow mediation in cases of domestic violence and other similar gender-based harms. Portrayed as vehicle to justice for the victims, and even outside the formal legal ambit, mediation has been widely used in community settings, often almost tantamount to reconciliation.

In his presentation, he want to contend that the approach of mediation in gender-based harms actually aggravates such harms by neither providing victims with healing and the offenders with accountability. He propose that instead of mediation, using Restorative Justice (RJ) can best help us arrive at healing and accountability. Using restorative justice in gender-based harms is still a debated issue generally, but this use can be tactically used to further RJ in Nepal and beyond. He will also take a step further and discuss how the field of RJ should separate itself from the paradigm of mediation (such as in victim-offender mediation).

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