Research On The Victim-offender-reconciliation System In China

With the social development and progress, because of the traditional criminal justice model taking national prosecution as a symbol and the penalty structure taking imprisonment as the center, we fell incompetent when we compensate victims for losses in the correction of crime, restore the damaged social relations and other social effect. All of these bring us a series of problems. The shortage of traditional penalty function directly promote global criminal justice system having a big change in the 1970s. Restorative justice system, plea bargaining system and victim-offender mediation and other related systems have been produced. The concept of these systems has been introduced into China.Base on the research of the restorative justice, plea bargaining and victim-offender mediation, our country's legal theorists generally consider that victim-offender mediation can accord with China's traditional culture, and existing laws, regulations and judicial practice. It also can be widely used in China as a judicial system. Its modern connotation of democracy and the rule of law has a universal value and the value of building a socialist harmonious society features. More than that, it can fit in well with our implementation of criminal justice policy of combining punishment with leniency.Victim-offender mediation, although gradually become a hot topic of academics and practitioners of criminal law, it still has great distress because at present criminal law does not establish specific victim-offender mediation. Hence, it may lead to favoritism in judicial practice and indulge crimes which are not conductive to show the advantage of victim-offender mediation and the majesty of the law.This article embarks from victim-offender mediation's connotation, defines victim-offender mediation as in the criminal prosecution process, the perpetrator who obtains the understanding of victims after sincere repentance in the offender, and pleaded guilty, compensation, apology, etc, the national special organs would exonerate the perpetrator from criminal penalties or a light punishment. Furthermore through the comparison among reconciliation, restoration, criminal justice, plea bargaining, mediation, "compounding" and other systems, the author tries to grasp the essence of the criminal settlement system and its unique. Then the author analyzes the three theoretical bases of criminal reconciliation by Western scholars:" Narrative Theory ", " Restorative Justice Theory " and " Rquity Theory ", then compares the function of the criminal settlement system and the traditional Confucian culture in China to find the meeting point between the them, and demonstrates the basis for the promotion of victim-offender mediation in China.Every system is not perfect. Victim-offender mediation not only focus on repairing damaged social relations, maintaining social harmony and social reintegration of offenders, but also the weakening of the existence and function of criminal law to prevent the destruction of the principle of equity and other issues. Based on the analysis of the current judicial practice in China, the author proposes to improve the system of criminal mediation. That means State legislature should clear authority for the criminal settlement, scope, prerequisites, applicable procedures, the way of end a case and relief channels, and so on. What's more, the legislature should regulate criminal settlement system to fully play its effective functioning and better able to make up for the traditional adversarial criminal proceedings defects. In addition, because of the lack of deferred prosecution, especially non-custodial coercive measures are rarely used, it is not conducive to carry out victim-offender mediation in China. This article suggests that legislation should be gradually established for the deferred prosecution in the premise of the existing legal norms based on the national conditions, so that the perpetrators of victim-offender mediation can be monitored and inspected. More over appropriate non-custodial coercive measures to expand the application of the parties to provide reasonable and equitable exchange platform to create better conditions for victim-offender mediation, to restore the damaged social relations, better maintenance of perpetrators, victims and society in the interests of constituents.