Focus on victims and the community: applying restorative justice principles to wildlife crime offences in South Africa

Hübschle, Annette; Dore, Ashleigh; Davies-Mostert, Harriet

Focus on victims and the community: applying restorative justice principles to wildlife crime offences in South Africa

Journal Article

2021

Journal Title

The International Journal of Restorative Justice

Link to Journal

https://www.elevenjournals.com/tijdschrift/TIJRJ/detail

Department

Global Risk Governance Programme

Faculty

Faculty of Law

Abstract

This note introduces a pilot project that seeks to apply restorative justice principles to wildlife crime offences in South Africa. A local conservation NGO, the Endangered Wildlife Trust, under the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) South Africa Khetha Programme and supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), is piloting this innovative project in a harm landscape (wildlife crime offences) that is renowned for retributive and punitive approaches to justice. The project was launched in August 2019 and although the project team was still in the inception phase at the time of writing, team members have made great headway in developing a conceptual framework and implementation plan. This note explains why we think the time is ripe for environmental restorative justice in South Africa and how we plan to implement the pilot project; we also share lessons learnt for future initiatives and projects.

Keywords

wildlife crime

environmental restorative justice

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