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

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