Mediation and restorative approach in resolving criminal law conflicts

A number of international legal instruments is highly recommended to upgrade the national system of conflict resolution in the sphere of criminal law with the view of the importance of not only traditional prohibitive, punitive and preventive, but, first of all, restorative tasks. Such modernization, which implies a tran-sition from the strategy of “combating crime” to strategies of “reducing the harm from crime”, requires a combination of methods of “punitive” and “restorative justice” in order to most effectively solve the problems of compensation for the harm caused to the victim and restoring his normal life and disturbed public order, as well as correcting and re-socializing the person who committed the crime in order to avoid repetition of criminal activity. But in order for such a transformation of the paradigm of criminal law policy to be organic and natural rather than artificially implanted, it is necessary that certain socio-political and legal factors that determine the formation and development of mediation and other restorative justice programs in the field of criminal law should develop in the Russian reality. For the first time in Russian science, the article, poses and investigates the problem of socio-legal laws of the concept of restorative justice. The conducted research contributes to identifying and formulating a set of laws characterizing the formation and development of the restorative approach; this allows on the basis of identified patterns to assess the current state of its socio-legal prerequisites in Russia.