Justice De Proximité - The Growth of ‘Houses of Justice’ and Victim/Offender Mediation in France: A Very Unfrench Legal Response?
| Date | 01 March 2000 |
| Author | Adam Crawford |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390000900103 |
| Published date | 01 March 2000 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
JUSTICE DE PROXIMITÉ – THE
GROWTH OF ‘HOUSES OF
JUSTICE’ AND
VICTIM/OFFENDER MEDIATION
IN FRANCE: A VERY
UNFRENCH LEGAL
RESPONSE?
ADAM CRAWFORD
University of Leeds, UK
ABSTRACT
Initiatives in mediation and reparation have developed significantly across diverse
European countries, none more so than in France over the last decade. This article
seeks to situate and explain the recent growth in France of the ‘Maisons de Justice’
(Houses of Justice) and victim/offender mediation they offer. This explanation is con-
nected to an understanding of the increasingly dominant discourse of ‘justice de prox-
imité’, its dynamics and its place within French juridical politics. The article draws
upon ESRC funded empirical – observational and interview-based – research con-
ducted in the Lyon and Paris areas during 1997. The article goes on to interrogate the
implications of these institutions and practices for the present state of French crimi-
nal justice. It is argued that through the analysis of these ‘very unFrench’ legal
responses we can prise open fundamental ambiguities and debates at the heart of
French legal and cultural life in a period of momentous socio-legal challenge and flux.
It is suggested that these institutions and practices embody, at the same time as trying
to resolve, significant contradictions within French legal culture.
INITIATIVES INvictim/offender mediation and reparation have come to
constitute a significant development within and around criminal justice
systems across Europe, North America and Australasia. Quantitatively
these initiatives remain at the margins of criminal justice. However, they pose
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (200003) 9:1 Copyright © 2000
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important qualitative questions about the nature of justice and wider social
relations, both through their implicit critique of existing legal institutions and
practices and their appeal to some alternative notion of social and communal
order and control (Crawford, 2000). Moreover, mediation occupies an
ambiguous conceptual position that is simultaneously both ‘within’, and yet
‘outside’ of, the criminal justice system. It constitutes a ‘conceptual cuckoo’
within the criminal justice nest (Zedner, 1994: 234). Mediation gives rise to a
diversity of practice and draws support from divergent political interests as
well as different professional and community groups. In short, mediation
means different things to different people. This gives it a ‘richness’, notably
in terms of the wider organisational, social, legal and cultural referents to
which it gives rise. Simultaneously, this has allowed mediation to gain
support from diverse sources and to fit into the prevailing political rhetoric
at a given moment. However, it also means that specific initiatives can be
pulled in different, and often competing, directions as they attempt to meet
their multiple aims and objectives and to satisfy the divergent demands of the
different constituencies.
In France this conceptual indeterminacy is accentuated. The French speak
not of ‘victim/offender mediation’, as in Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions, but of
‘penal mediation’ (la médiation pénale). This conjunction of two apparently
contradictory terms is ambiguous, as it suggests an affinity between ‘media-
tion’ and ‘punishment’. However, in theory at least, mediation is a process of
dispute resolution unencumbered by an outcome. It is a method of com-
munication by which negotiations between the opposing parties (‘face-to-
face’ or through the mediator as a ‘go-between’) are brought about by a third
party who attempts to facilitate the parties to reach their own negotiated
solutions to their problems. The mediator acts as an intermediary – a conduit
in communication – but theoretically has no authority to make a decision or
force a settlement. Hence, the idea that mediation should be tied to a penal
logic poses fundamental philosophical anomalies.
Yet this confusion about what mediation is – the diverse interests which have
sought to champion its name for different reasons and its ambiguous relation-
ship to criminal justice and punishment – rather than undermining its value as
the subject of enquiry, instead infuses its development and practice with wider
social, legal and cultural referents. Consequently, many of the salient debates
and tensions concerning the nature and shape of criminal justice come together
around, and are refracted through, the development and practice of victim/
offender mediation within given jurisdictions. As Bonafé-Schmitt notes: ‘In
France the phenomenon of penal mediation constitutes a very good illustration
for the analysis of the issues and constraints encountered in the construction
of penal policy in the course of the last few years’ (1998: 18). It acts as a lever
into fundamental issues about the role of law as mode of social governance, as
well as relations between civil society and the State. In this context, as Faget
notes, ‘it is less penal mediation which is of interest, itself, than that which it
indicates about the construction of legal policy signalling a rupture with pre-
existing models of law and the liberal State’ (1997: 18).
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