Anna Matczak

Anna Matczak is a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Criminology at The Hague University of Applied Sciences and a Restorative Justice Expert.

She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science, focusing on how Polish lay people perceive punishment and justice, and how these narratives inform the viability of restorative justice in Poland. Post-Ph.D., her focus has been largely on restorative justice. From 2017 until 2022, Anna was Chair of the EFRJ (European Forum for Restorative Justice ) Research Committee. In 2019, she contributed to the UNODC’s revision of the Restorative Justice Programmes Handbook. Between 2020 and 2022, she also mentored the Wrocław Restorative Justice Board, aiding Wrocław’s integration into the restorative cities network, officially proclaimed in November 2021. She is now a member of the CEP Research Committee, where she is engaged in promoting restorative justice practices among probation officers. In 2023, she prepared a report, commissioned by the Council of Europe, on the integration of victim-offender mediation, as a restorative justice practice, in the Armenian probation system. Since 2023, Anna is involved in the Erasmus+ funded research project ‘Crossing Protect’, which aims to build a cross-sectoral training approach (restorative justice and victim support services) to respond to and curtail gender-based violence.

In 2022 she started developing a second research track and is currently in the process of writing a book (Springer) entitled “Adapting to Climate Change in Modern Policing. The Rise of the “Eco-Cop”, on the topic of how climate change impacts police practice across the world. In April 2024, along with dr. Sylvia Bergh, she was awarded a research grant by the Dutch Police Academy to conduct a comparative study exploring capacity building mechanisms for environmental crime investigations. Anna joined the NHC Committee in June 2023.