Restorative Justice and Penal Mediation. The Need to Remove Barriers

This paper aims to deal briefly with the meaning of so-called Restorative Justice; differentiate it from one of its manifestations, penal mediation (the most relevant and most currently used process, with greater possibilities to be implemented in our criminal justice system in the future); as well as rebut some of the usual objections that the procedural and penal doctrine adhere to when facing the possibility of having our legal system accept this instance in a significant way. We gather that the traditional assumption of ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolutions) should be nuanced in the Spanish Criminal System and opt for the expression Adequate Dispute Resolution, thus assuming this form of penal mediation as integrated into the criminal process and not considered separately as a substitution or alternative.