Extract
[...] Far from being just a formal clause, the free consent of the accused and the victim constitutes the keystone of a device whose ethical scope rests on the freedom of participation and the sincerity of the commitment. Participation in a restorative procedure must emanate from a clear will, free from any constraint, institutional pressure or induced strategic calculation176. A true freedom of choice cannot exist without complete, precise, and intelligible information on the nature, purposes, modalities, and legal consequences of the restorative procedure. This requirement for information is first addressed to institutions. It is up to the judicial authorities and mediation professionals to ensure a conducive environment for the free expression of the parties. [...]
[...] It has become a plural space, within which diverse procedural figures, bearing heterogeneous rights, express themselves, interact, and sometimes clash. This evolution is not just quantitative; it is structural. It is no longer just one litigant around whom the procedure revolves, but several figures with specific legal statuses, distinct rights, different temporalities, and sometimes competing objectives. Thus, the procedural rights recognized to the victim do not have the same purposes as those of the accused, based on the imperatives of defense, non-incrimination, and presumption of innocence. [...]
[...] The legal word is a step, not a resolution. This observation in no way disqualifies the contribution of law. On the contrary, it reveals its nobility and humility. For to assume one's own limits is also to recognize that justice is not self-sufficient. It needs relays, echoes, and extensions. It needs that civil society that listens without judging, that collective memory that inscribes experience in history, that institutional empathy that restores without condemning. Thus, true recognition cannot be thought of in silos. [...]
[...] This evolution, far from being marginal or accidental, marks a profound shift in the way criminal justice conceives, hears and articulates narratives. It is no longer just material evidence or argumentative logic that structures the hearing: it is also the affective density of a testimony, the symbolic charge of a narrative or the expressive power of a manifested pain. The law is therefore confronted with a constitutive tension: that of having to welcome emotion without submitting to it, to listen to it without erecting it as a criterion of truth. [...]
[...] The offense becomes an act against social peace, not a primarily personal injury. The victim then ceases to be a central subject to become an auxiliary of the public prosecutor26. But the eclipse of the victim cannot be understood solely in the light of doctrine. It has been embodied with all the more rigor as it has been translated, in the very forms of the criminal trial, into a procedural configuration where individual expression is methodically kept at bay. For it is indeed the very architecture of the trial that has consolidated, structured, and then perpetuated the erasure. [...]
