刑事調停制度의 活性化方案

Abstract

The victim-offender mediation system refers in principle to the procedure in which a third party who is situated in the neutral position arranges to mediate the directly concerned persons to eventually come to reconciliation and to reflect such results in processing or judgement of a case. In a word, the victim-offender mediation is simply a process of resolving disputes or conflicts resulted from the offense happening between an offender and a victim and of recovering the loss of the damaged. Viewed from the perspective of the judicial system, the victim-offender mediation could be seen as a form of citizen participation in that the neutral third party, instead of the criminal justice agency, plays a key role in mediation and the mediator cooperates with the criminal justice agency to a certain extent while keeping a good distance from it, at least when resolving conflicts. It may be said, however, that the victim-offender mediation system is very significant since both offender and victim take initiative in mediation to solve the case jointly, which is totally different from the process of handling legal cases under the existing criminal justice system. The victim-offender mediation system in Korea is applauded as having raised capabilities of the investigating and judicial authorities by reducing their burden of having to deal with matters of private autonomy,encouraging to solve problems autonomously, letting judicial officers by thus concentrate on investigating into important incidents, prompting victims to recover from the damage rapidly, ridding offenders of unnecessary restriction or threatening of such by the investigating authorities, defending as a consequence the human rights of offenders, helping them to reunite with the community or society they belonged to in the past, preventing them from repeating offenses, etc. In parallel with widening awareness of positive effects and usefulness of the victim-offender mediation system among the people in this country,responses to the system are expected to become more and more intensified in the days to come. To vitalize and refine the victim-offender mediation system more exquisitely, it seems essential for the prosecutors standing in front line, on the one hand, to drastically increase referral of incidents to settlement by victim-offender mediation and, on the other hand, for the heads of legal institutions, prosecutors in charge and staff members of prosecution to show more active concern and cooperation to increase the number of criminal mediation, minimize the ratio of failure to call for mediation and ward off difference in the number of victim-offender mediations among each prosecutor's office. Moreover, it is also deemed necessary to diversify and specialize election of members for mediation, increase their numbers,organize seminars or workshops to train them and to develop and share their techniques to improve successful settlement by mediation and to give publicity of exemplary cases, in addition to continued efforts to improve working conditions of those engaged in mediation.