Customary Land Tenure in Liberia - Land Tenure and Property ...

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include: 1) law that grants legal recognition to land claimed under customary tenure, 2) regulations that map
out a process for systematically documenting the land rights of rural communities based on custom, and 3)
enactment and completion of that process at a national level. The moratorium need not occur over the whole
country before any investment/concessions can take place, but rather could be prioritized on a case-by-case
basis in each specific area where investments/concessions are planned.
Bruce and Kanneh (2011) advise the GOL to consider a new Public Land Law that “defines public land and
clearly distinguishes between public land and land held by local communities under customary land tenure.”
Reforms to the Public Land Law could be coupled by a Community Rights Law that would substantially
replace the Hinterlands Rules and Regulations and the Aborigines Law – if the latter is even still in effect. By
drawing on the positive elements of these laws while abrogating the archaic, contradictory elements that
infringe on Community Land rights, a Community Rights Law would provide explicit recognition of customary
land rights as perpetual, heritable rights subject to the same legal protections as fee simple tenure, though not
necessarily including rights of transfer and mortgage. Such a law might also define Tribal Reserve (first
articulated, but never defined, in the Hinterlands Law) as land available for communities to exert collective,
perpetual, heritable rights to land in accordance with custom, and which is inalienable unless removed by a
member of the claimant community via a locally prescribed process to convert it to individualized fee simple
tenure.
To maximize capture of all or most land currently governed under customary tenure systems, Community Land
could potentially apply to all land falling outside designated urban zones that is currently not secured by a
legitimately acquired fee simple deed or government claim (e.g., park, public university, military installation,
roads, port) and not presently encumbered by an existing leasehold or concession granted by the government.
Community Land would therefore be excluded from the public land realm, making it not only ineligible for
public land sale, but also tempering the practice of government granting concessions without regard to
whether the land is under customary claim(s). Clearly, special provisions would need to be made for existing
leases and concessions on land that would otherwise fall under Community Land to ensure that current
beneficiaries be allowed to retain rights under existing contractual terms. However, upon the date of contract
expiry, such land could become automatically designated as Community Land, providing local communities an
opportunity to exert customary claims.
10.2 DOCUMENTATION OF CUSTOMARY RIGTHS
In order to equip communities with the means to safeguard their customary land rights, we recommend that
the GOL issue documentation that vests those rights in communities, not individuals. Such documentation
would vest in communities rights on par with those guaranteed under fee simple tenures, minus the right of
alienation. It is clear from the customary land tenure research described in this report and in other research
carried out in rural Liberia that group tenure based on patrilineal and other community affiliations form the
foundation on which customary land tenure systems in rural Liberia function. While war, economic
opportunity, and the imposition of statutory law and authority structures have taken a toll on compliance with
customary law, by and large these systems continue to command strong social legitimacy and, for most rural
communities, are the only tenure systems that truly govern how people access and use land and natural
resources. For these reasons, we recommend that the principal basis for documentation of customary tenure
should be the unit within which primary rights to access land and natural resources are acquired and where
the main locus of land and resource governance is housed – the core tenure unit. This would provide the
necessary flexibility to vest and document rights in towns, quarters, extended families, or other communal
structures based on what local communities identify to be socially legitimate.
The mechanics of how those land rights should be documented is complex given that Liberia not only has a
long history of recording rights in the form of deeds, but also has law on its books governing title registration
and may eventually move toward replacing deeds with a title registration system. Laws governing both deed
registration and title registration allow for the registration of rights vested in groups. However, the systems
are cumbersome and costly, and – at least for deeds – have proven to be out of reach for most rural
CUSTOMARY LAND TENURE IN LIBERIA