Zambia – Project to Increase Justice for Women in Traditional Courts
Author: Womens UN Report Network
Date: February 25, 2013
WUNRN
ZAMBIA – PROJECT TO INCREASE JUSTICE
FOR WOMEN IN TRADITIONAL COURTS
By
Amy Lieberman – WeNews Correspondent- March 7, 2013
A
woman in rural Zambia
carries a basket of water on her head.Credit:
Jason Pramas for Open Media Boston,
under Creative Commons
UN – Zambia
-(WOMENSENEWS)–Charles Dinda is conducting an
experiment. With funding from the Danish Institute for Human Rights, the Zambian legal researcher
and human rights activist is carrying out a
pilot project in the country’s southern and eastern provinces that links
paralegals trained in formal court systems with local tribal courts.
One goal is to bolster the
justice that women receive in traditional tribunals for complaints of sexual
violence, divorce, custody and inheritance.
The
paralegals come from the same rural areas to which they are assigned. They
offer free legal advice and counseling on human rights, targeting women in
their advocacy outreach.
They are
also training local leaders to recognize cases beyond their jurisdiction–such
as child abduction or murder–for referral to state-run, local courts. Since
the pilot program launched about a year ago, more of these cases are being
referred to state-run courts, Dinda said.
“Right
now the environment is not very good in Zambia but a lot is changing,” he said. “In our draft constitution and bill
of rights there has been an increase of enlisting discussion of human rights
and the local courts are, little by little, becoming more receptive to this
idea, to see that women are given a fair deal.”
In many parts of rural Zambia, a woman with a dispute she can’t resolve on
her own will be funneled into a traditional court, mandated by traditional
leaders who are seldom formally trained in governance or human rights.
Male Run Courts
“In
most cases a woman at a traditional court will find that she is going to face
nine men against one woman, because the courts are predominately male
run,” Dinda said in a phone interview from Zambia.
“Then, traditionally, a woman is not supposed to challenge any male person
or her husband, so when she is challenged by the court that can make her claims
very difficult to back.”
Traditional
justice systems–also called informal or customary– function outside the
sphere of official state laws and handle about 80 percent of disputes in most
developing countries, according to U.N. Women.
Driven by
cultural and religious traditions, they have long been studied by
anthropologists. Now they’re attracting growing notice by human rights
activists and researchers interested in improving the legal treatment of women.
“We
are starting to provide a framework, so we can look at the strengths and
weaknesses of these systems and in five or 10 years we can get a better basis
for comparison,” said Fergus
Kerrigan, lead author of a January 2013 report
on informal justice systems and human rights. A group of U.N. agencies
commissioned the report from the Danish Institute for Human Rights.
Rural women in much of the world cannot access official courts. “They are
too far away, too expensive,” Kerrigan said. “We see more potential
in trying to reform informal justice systems in a positive way than say we are
going to abolish these and expect that everybody can go to a state court
because that is just unrealistic.”
Gender Cases Referred
Traditional
rulers in some places will refer gender-specific cases to their nation’s formal
courts. Male-dominated indigenous legal councils in Ecuador,
for instance, will do this with rape cases.
In some
cases, informal justice affords women a higher degree of legal protection than
state courts and laws.
In Niger,
for example, communities that adhere to Sharia, or Islamic law, and not state
law, will grant women rights to some portion of inherited family land in her name,
which official law in Niger
does not do. Yet Sharia also permits polygamy and limits a woman’s ability in
rural Niger
to independently seek a divorce.
While
women often face overwhelmingly male power structures, Juan Carlos Botero, executive
director of the Washington-based World Justice
Project, cautions against generalizing about the
up-or-down treatment of women in these informal systems.
“There
are traditions where male dominance has been part of the culture, and in
general the elders of the community are men, so that may create a bias,”
said Botero in a phone interview. “But in Liberia,
for example, there are female chiefs, too.”
In Rwanda
and Malawi,
the strong participation of female mediators and judges in informal justice has
encouraged female victims of violence to step forward, the January 2013
U.N.-sponsored report found.
Traditional
courts in Uganda,
South Africa,
Bangladesh and Papa New Guinea
have all set quotas for female representation.
Yet Papa New Guinea,
for instance, still has a state law that criminalizes sorcery. And a United
Nations investigator in March noted that women are disproportionately
targeted as victims of violent attacks by those targeting
suspected sorcerers.
In Colombia,
the indigenous Kogi people mostly appoint male traditional justice heads, but
sometimes women serve the role, as well, and have the chance of a fair hearing,
said the World
Justice Project’s Botero.
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