NARRATIVE REPORT 2009 - The ICHRP

International Council on Human Rights Policy - Narrative Report 2009
Research director: Magdalena Sepúlveda Carmona.
Start: Quarter 1, 2008.
Paper commissioned: May-July 2008.
Working title:
Sexuality and Human Rights. In English.
Draft report: July 2008. Redraft: September-October 2008.
Consultation: August-September 2008.
Publication: July 2009.
Research team:
Alice Miller.
See also: Section C: Sexuality, health and human rights (project 134).
When Legal Worlds Overlap: Human Rights, State and Non-State Law (135)
Published October 2009
An initial draft of this report was prepared at the end of November 2008 and was completed during
the first quarter of 2009. It was circulated for comment in the second quarter of 2009 and the report
was published in October, accompanied by a CD-ROM that contains a large volume of documents on
the issue, including all the non-copyright texts that provided the foundation for the Councils analysis.
A Summary will be published in French, Spanish and English in 2010. A translation of the full report
into Arabic is under discussion.
The report examines human rights issues that arise when more than one legal norm or regime is
recognised within a given jurisdiction – a common situation in a large number of countries. It has been
very well received by experts and specialists in this complex and contested field, because it is one of
the first detailed examinations of plural legal environments from a human rights perspective, and
takes into account a particularly wide range of situations and contexts.
During the first phase of research, the Council surveyed numerous examples of plural legal orders:
personal law regimes in multi-ethnic and multi-religious states (Israel, Malaysia, Egypt, Indonesia,
Nigeria, India, the United Kingdom, Lebanon); indigenous (customary) law regimes in both multiethnic
settler-colony nation-states such as Australia, the United States and Canada, and contexts in
which the indigenous (customary) legal order has special status (many Latin American countries,
Zambia, Kenya); societies in which customary/non-state legal mechanisms are being reformed or
reconfigured by state or civil society organisations, especially with support from international
development agencies (local council courts in Uganda, salishes in Bangladesh, Justices of the Peace in
Peru); and contexts in which the state is weak or fragile following conflict or emergence from conflict
(Nepal, Palestine/The Occupied Territories, Sierra Leone).
In parallel, the Research Team produced an approach paper, updated as the research progressed, to
provide an analytical framework, and commissioned three individual papers, submitted in September
2008, which respectively addressed indigenous jurisdiction in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the
United States (by Kirsty Gover), personal law in Israel, Egypt and India (by Yüksel Sezgin), and a case
study of the salish system in Bangladesh (by Sarah Hossain); in addition, Mathew John prepared a
general background analysis on culture, human rights and legal pluralism.
Three expert meetings were held, to focus and then review the research, and to consider findings and
recommendations. These meetings were reported in last year’s narrative report.
Follow-up activities will continue through 2010. Vijay Nagaraj, the Research Director responsible,
presented the report to a large conference on rule of law, legal pluralism and conflict, co-sponsored
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