Restorative justice in socioeconomic and corruption crimes

Abstract

This contribution aims to explore the viability of implementing restorative justice encounters in the field of socioeconomic and corruption crimes. In these cases, the response of the traditional penal system is not satisfactory due to these three main reasons: a) neither the community owning the interest nor the associations acting on its behalf are recognised as injured parties; b) the damages are not always direct and economic in nature, but social (social damage), indirect and diffuse (affecting an indeterminate group of people, society as a whole); c) there is no channel for claiming reparation for the damage caused. The criminal process must be complemented by restorative justice. However, crimes against supra-individual legal assets present different characteristics from classic crime -the hard core of criminal law- which represent, at the very least, several challenges for carrying out restorative justice processes.