Examples Of Retributive Justice And Restorative Justice

When emerging from conflict, nations seek ways in which to address the atrocities of the past, in order to move forward into a more peaceful future. There are no shortcuts or simple solutions for healing the wounds of victims that experienced those treacherous events. Invariably, the utterance of retributive justice and restorative justice arises as the means to finding a solution. As the fields of retributive justice and restorative justice appear they are both relatively emerging examples of approaches, and, over the course of the past decade, there has been mutual expansion and interaction to inform the people of the needs, rights and expectations of divided societies and individuals whose lives have been shattered by conflict. On the contrary, as simple as that might sound justice to have such a brief definition (the quality of being just or righteous.) , it’s likely to assume that the term (justice) is a superficial one. This essay shall raise a very complex and contentious question: is there conflict in what defines true justice?
“Justice consists not in being neutral between right and wrong, but in finding out the right and upholding it, wherever found, against the wrong.”
- President Theodore Roosevelt
True justice means that anyone of any ethnicity, age, gender, and sexual preference is treated fairly under the law. Unfortunately, today we live in a world where “true justice” has never really had any existence. Because justice is in the eye of the beholder, there is a walloping clash between the conceptions of how to seek justice. In the traditional system, it is done in the courts across the world (ICTR, ICTY, Supreme Court, and etc.) where the actions in court are all directed at the offender in disregard to the victi...

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...f all sovereignty because of the first World War. Why vent hatred on murderers when justice should regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? The purpose of the criminal system is to establish whether the accused is guilty, and if so, to find out what drove him to commit the act. The focus is not on the offender’s responsibility or culpability, but on discovering how best to fix him. For example, traditional courts like the ICTR was put into place convict the perpetrators of genocides would be classified as a form of retributive justice that has a limited effect on shaping reconciliation: automatically forgetting about the core issues of post-genocide resolution and focus on harshly punishing the offender(s). Barbara Wootton states that “the purpose of punishment, then, is to try to achieve this ‘fix’ and to ‘set him on the road to virtue.”