Criminal mediation as a restorative justice program in Colombian criminal procedure

Abstract

Law 906 of 2004, the current Code of Criminal Procedure, included in its Book VI that which relates to restorative justice and indicated, in Art. 521, that its mechanisms are preprocedural conciliation, conciliation in the incident of integral reparation and mediation. This study focuses on the latter, because, although the criminal procedure statute entrusted the Attorney General's Office to issue a manual to develop it, more than ten years after the entry into force of the law, this task has not been fully accomplished. Section twelve of the Prosecutor's Procedures Manual (2006), although it comes close to this, does not include all the elements required by art. 527 of Law 906 of 2004. In practice, the use of mediation is scarce by the actors of the system, which limits the application of restorative justice in criminal matters in Colombia. This article sets out the principles of restorative justice, the procedural elements of criminal mediation indicated by the legislator, and makes some proposals regarding the training of mediators in the national criminal procedural system; in this order, it sheds light on how this type of justice can be effectively developed in criminal matters.