Building bridges: African customary family law and children's rights

Balancing Rights or Building Rights? Reconciling the Right to Use Customary Systems of Law with Competing Human Rights in Pursuit of Indigenous Sovereignty

In 2007, after more than 20 years of exhaustive negotiations, drafts and re-drafts between indigenous groups and member states, the United Nations (“UN”) finally adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (“Declaration”) by an overwhelming majority.2 The UN thereby recognized the right of indigenous peoples “to promote, develop and maintain their . . . distinctive customs, spir...

Family Law and Policy Adoption Rights. Former

almost half of the largest corporations in the United States had extended their own employee benefit plans to recognize same-sex partners (most of them also including de facto heterosexual couples for the first time). The vast majority of major universities and colleges had taken the same step by that time. While some of these changes were induced by legal or statutory change at the local or st...

The Formation of Customary Law

Islamic Law , Customary Law , and Afghan Informal Justice

This report is part of the United States Institute of Peace’s (USIP) ongoing effort to understand the pluralist legal system of Afghanistan. It examines, compares, and contrasts Islamic law with traditional forms of justice in an attempt to elucidate how such rule of law approaches interact as well as provide a fuller understanding of each system to better guide rule of law practice, policy, an...

Traditional governance and African customary law: Comparative observations from a Namibian perspective

The traditional versus the modern, the modern in the traditional, the traditional in the modern: topics high on the agenda of scholars and politicians! Emphasising one’s own (past) culture is widely practiced and part of political discourses at local, national and even international levels. The focus on one’s own culture may serve different purposes. It may be a pretext for covering otherwise u...