Giselle Corradi

Access to justice in Pemba city: how exploring women's lived realities with plural law uncovers programmatic gaps

This contribution explores the links between women’s lived realities with plural law and development interventions that aim at improving women’s access to justice. Based on a case study in Pemba city, northern Mozambique, the paper illustrates the relevance of incorporating ‘actor oriented’ perspectives on gender and legal change within justice sector aid. First, it describes the justice landscape of Pemba city in terms of the legal actors to whom women resort, their procedures, the types of case that they deal with and how they relate to each other. Secondly, it depicts the kinds of strategy that have been supported at the national level and in Pemba city in order to improve women’s access to justice, and analyses how these relate to the justice landscape of Pemba. Third, it examines the testimonies provided by different women in Pemba city regarding their perspectives on justice processes and their experiences with the law while exploring how the latter are related to programmatic efforts. This exercise reveals that the enforcement of justice forum decisions is a crucial area for women’s access to justice that remains out of sight. The conclusion argues that understanding women’s lived realities with the law is essential in two ways. On the one hand, it is necessary for assessing the kinds of process that interventions set in motion and the extent to which the latter contribute to the realisation of women’s rights. On the other hand, it uncovers areas of intervention that remain unaddressed despite their potential to generate positive changes.

Human rights promotion in post conflict Sierra Leone: coming to grips with plurality in customary justice

Abstract Improving ‘access to justice for the poor’ features high on justice sector reform agendas in post conflict sub-Saharan Africa. This results in increased attention for the role of customary structures of dispute resolution at the grassroots. At the same time, it raises the challenge to address possible areas of tension between customary justice and human rights. Based on a case study in Sierra Leone, this article explores the scope, reach and limits of interventions that aim at promoting human rights within customary justice. The paper shows that the latter is multi-layered, including different actors and approaches for the maintenance of local order, with some forums adjudicating according to customary rules and others favoring mediation and the achievement of a negotiated solution. It argues that most interventions tend to focus on official customary justice providers and the identification of customary rules, while ignoring or at best indirectly targeting non-official actors and practices. It concludes that more attention is needed to plurality in customary justice, both in terms of the multiplicity of actors that play a role at grassroots level, the different approaches they follow for the resolution of conflicts, and the particular challenges and opportunities they present for the promotion of human rights locally.

Editorial Introduction: Children and Young People in Legally Plural Worlds

This thematic section entitled ‘children and young people in legally plural worlds’ builds on a panel that was organised by the guest editors during the 2013 conference of the Commission on Legal Pluralism in Manchester. The panel was conceived as an opportunity to bring together theoretical and empirical contributions reflecting on under-researched issues concerning the relationship between children, children’s rights, and legal pluralism. The papers presented during the panel addressed questions such as how children and young people engage with the plurality of normative orders impacting on their daily life and well-being, what the rights conceptions of children and young people are in different cultural and normative contexts, and what the role and potential of ‘children’s rights’, understood as the human rights of children, are in relation to other (state and non-state) bodies of law. In other words, the theme of the panel was conceptualised in broad terms, covering many areas of research. As the preparation of a publication based on this panel advanced, we decided to focus on the theme ‘children’s rights and legal pluralism’. Although not exclusively, the four articles that follow interrogate how various normative orders interplay with the human rights of children. The first three articles analyse this interplay in the context of judicial proceedings concerning different aspects of children’s lives, such as grandparent grandchild relationships (Simon), child residency arrangements after parental disunion (Lecoyer and Simon), and adoption (Corrin and Mulitalo). More specifically, they describe and reflect on the complexities involved in applying one of the general principles of children’s rights law, the ‘best interests of the child’, when a plurality of normative regimes criss-cross the relationships in which children are embedded. Taken together, the three articles suggest that the implementation of this principle by judiciaries operating in contexts of normative and cultural plurality is problematic, either because they are blind to or reject such diversity (Simon, Lecoyer and Simon), or because the state fails to regulate it appropriately (Corrin and Mulitalo). The fourth contribution by Corradi and Desmet adopts a different entry point to the subject. By presenting a review of the existing literature on legal pluralism and children’s rights, it acts as a backdrop or map against which the other contributions of this thematic section can be located. Common to the four contributions is an understanding of legal pluralism in terms of the multiple normative regimes that co-regulate children’s relationships and entitlements in practice, independently from whether these norms have official status in state law. Such a ‘bottom-up’ understanding of legal pluralism is a crucial matter for children and young people, whose capacity to act in the human rights field is more often than not mediated by various relationships with adults and the norms that apply to those relationships. Hence, the articles often use the terms ‘legal’ and ‘normative’ pluralism interchangeably. This is not intended to deny the social force of state authority, nor its symbolic power. The point is rather that understanding how children’s rights operate in concrete contexts, requires an empirically grounded approach to legal pluralism that

A review of literature on children's rights and legal pluralism

This paper reviews and reflects upon the literature in which childrens rights and legal pluralism stand at the core. This scholarship has mainly addressed three research questions: how global childrens rights standards interrelate with local normative orders and practices; how children as well as justice providers navigate legally plural orders; and how legal pluralism interplays with social change and the realisation of childrens rights. As regards research topics, intra-family relations have received more scholarly attention than the position of children in the wider society. Even though, often implicitly, a variety of theoretical approaches may be discerned, particularly regarding the conceptualisation of childrens rights (e.g. as semi-autonomous or static) and legal pluralism (e.g. as dichotomous or multi-level). In the conceptualisation of children and childhood, a social constructionist approach is predominant. On this basis, we formulate a number of suggestions for future research. It is concluded that further developing the subfield of childrens rights and legal pluralism is worthwhile, not only because of the specificity of the knowledge needed, but also because this may deepen our understanding of the interplay between legal pluralism and human rights more generally.