Rule of law or rules of law?
Kathy Green, who teaches at Benilde-St. Margaret's in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, alerted me to this BBC report on a complex issue that would make a good debate topic for a class.A thoughtful discussion is going on in the dignified press in the UK over the role of Sharia in Britain. The journalists would like the discussion to be more contentious, since that's what attracts customers.
For academic purposes, there are some important basic ideas involved in this discussion, and they are worth talking about. This report from the BBC mentions several.
Sharia comments trigger criticism
"The Archbishop of Canterbury has come under fire after appearing to back the adoption of some aspects of Sharia law in the UK...
"Culture Secretary Andy Burnham said such moves would create 'social chaos.'...
"Gordon Brown's spokesman said the prime minister 'believes that British laws should be based on British values'...
"Shaista Gohir, a government advisor on Muslim women and director of Muslim Voice UK, said she did not believe there was a need for Sharia courts because 'the majority of Muslims do not want it'...
"Shadow community cohesion minister Baroness Warsi... said: 'Dr Williams seems to be suggesting that there should be two systems of law, running alongside each other, almost parallel, and for people to be offered the choice of opting into one or the other. That is unacceptable.'
"Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said... 'Equality before the law is part of the glue that binds our society together. We cannot have a situation where there is one law for one person and different laws for another.'
"Trevor Phillips, who chairs the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said the 'implication that British courts should treat people differently based on their faith is divisive and dangerous'...
"Under English law, people may devise their own way to settle a dispute in front of an agreed third party as long as both sides agree to the process.
"Muslim Sharia courts and Orthodox Jewish courts which already exist in the UK come into this category..."
See also:
- The end of one law for all?
- Q and A: Sharia law explained
- Sharia law and the British legal system
- Religious courts already in use
Labels: political culture, rule-of-law, UK
posted by Ken Wedding @ 8:11 AM
1 Comments:
When God and the Law Don’t Square
"A PRETTY good way to generate an outcry, as the archbishop of Canterbury learned in Britain recently, is to say that a Western legal system should make room for Shariah, or Islamic law...
"The archbishop... did not propose importing Shariah into the criminal law and was referring mostly to divorces in which both sides have agreed to abide by the judgment of a religious tribunal. His proposal was groundbreaking only in extending to Islamic tribunals in Britain a role that Jewish and Christian ones have long played in the judicial systems of secular societies. Courts in the United States have endorsed all three kinds of tribunals.
"The larger question, legal experts in the United States said, is whether government courts should ever defer to religious ones. The answer may depend on whether the people involved authentically consented to religious adjudication, whether they are allowed to change their minds and whether the decisions of those tribunals are offensive to fundamental conceptions of justice...
"That notion has met resistance where Islam is involved. After the authorities in Ontario raised the possibility that arbitrators might use Shariah to settle family disputes, formal recognition of all religious arbitrations there, including existing Catholic and Jewish ones, was withdrawn.
"'There will be one law for all Ontarians,' Dalton McGuinty, the province’s premier, said in 2005..."
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