Sharia courts established in Britain

Welcome to the Islamic Republic of Great Britain. Unless ye be an infidel. Perhaps you'd prefer to visit the Dutch Emirates, or perhaps the Islamic Republics of France, Spain, or Italy?

How is domestic violence a "civil dispute"?

It seems to me that this doesn't really make sense. How can an arbitration proceeding allow anyone to give up any right? Or be influenced to give up any right? Or even rule against someone's rights?

The poster above noted the autonomy given on reservations. I have lived on one for a number of years, and I can witness first hand, that "justice" was a few grades lower than off the reservation.

Like the poster above, it seems to me that in a case of Islamic law, that a court would have to review the issues in the case to assure that no rights or liberties of either party are at stake, before it can be handed off to arbitration.

Frankly, the court system allowing another set of rules in play, and giving it authority is going to completely undermine either court authority, or the courts ultimate ability to enforce justice and defend rights and liberties.

If someone wants a financial or other such dispute judged by Sharia law, I see no reason it cannot be. But it must be wanted by both parties. And, the results should be overseen by the court of the land to ensure that no protections of anyone are violated.

This in itself tends to be counter to the sharia court having powers in and of itself of any kind. Voluntary is voluntary, until pressure can be applied - and we'd be kidding ourselves if we didn't think it would be - it is even in the best of justice systems, much less one that gives unequal deferences by definition.

Apparently the US already allows this sort of thing:

volokh.com/posts/chain_1202446904.shtml

Not sure what to make of that.

Well, if Roman Catholic canonical courts get the same respect, I say go for it - we'd see many a divorce overturned, eh?

Oops! My bad!

I didn't mean to dis' the established Church and all that.
Good ol' Henry VIII solved the separation of powers conundrum and gave his Parliament powers to nominate the bishops that set the rules favoring his divorce, right?

Flavor of the week in logical positivism:
L'ancien Britannia tyranny of relativism, matured in five, centuries-old caskets after a divorce, a beheading, a death in childbed, another divorce and beheading (Katherine of Aragon's, Anne Boleyn's, Jane Seymour's, Anne of Cleves, amnd Catherine Howard's)

Mrs Palin looks better every day - she's an authentic advocate of women's rights, the right to the dignity of womanhood.

"The UK--like the U.S.--recognizes decisions by a Beth Din, or all-male Rabbinical court. You can't recognize one kind of religious law and tribunal while refusing to recognize another."

except there is a big difference between a rabbinical court and the Sharia courts. In the case of the latter the UK government is deferring to the sharia courts in all matters including those that are normally handled by the civil government.

in the case of rabbinical courts they are generally ruling on divorces. the individuals having already gone through a civil divorce they must undergo a religious divorce in order that they may remarry within their faith.

The sharia courts are ruling on much, much more

Hasidic Jews have had the same, and conservative Christian churches very often handle their own matters too such as the different Anabaptist groups. But it's Muslims and everyone freaks out. I think every religion should have this right to govern their own business and not have to follow along under the state.

Daniel wrote: Sharia panels are not any different from a Beth Din or an Amish tribunal.

My reply: I have never heard of a Beth Din or Amish court sentencing a rape victim to be stoned to death for adultery.

That said, I don't have a problem with using either legislation or constitutional amendment to strip such any "courts" of any authority to "arbitrate" any case by any standard other than federal, state, and/or local statutes. One law for everyone.

I have never heard of a Beth Din or Amish court sentencing a rape victim to be stoned to death for adultery.

You're not likely to hear of this happening with one of these Islamic arbitrators either. The "courts" in question deal with matters of civil, rather than criminal law.

Blackadderiv: You're not likely to hear of this happening with one of these Islamic arbitrators either. The "courts" in question deal with matters of civil, rather than criminal law.

From the article:
It has also emerged that tribunal courts have settled six cases of domestic violence between married couples, working in tandem with the police investigations.

Siddiqi said he expected the courts to handle a greater number of “smaller” criminal cases in coming years as more Muslim clients approach them. “All we are doing is regulating community affairs in these cases,” said Siddiqi, chairman of the governing council of the tribunal.

Notice the creep from civil in the criminal areas. It won't take long before they are demanding full legal jurisdiction.

I have never heard of a Beth Din or Amish court sentencing a rape victim to be stoned to death for adultery.

You're not likely to hear of this happening with one of these Islamic arbitrators either. The "courts" in question deal with matters of civil, rather than criminal law.

You're especially not likely to hear of it in the UK, where there is, in fact, no death penalty, so that even if an arbitration resulted in a death penalty (Which is an absurdity), the actual courts sure couldn't enforce it.

This is binding arbitration. Binding arbitration is usually a bad idea, and I loath the abuse it's produced when companies require you participate in it if you do business with them.

That said, you guys don't appear to have problems at other times. So, logically, you guys seem to think it's okay when I have to agree to binding arbitration with my monopoly phone company to have a telephone, and if they ever drop a telephone poll on my car I have to sue them in their rigged court, but somehow it's not okay if I agree to have a disagreement heard in a Sharaia court?

And, regardless of what the article says, while you can sign away your rights for civil remedies, people cannot grant someone the right to commit crimes against them, period. (Ask Doctor Kevorkian about that one.)

'Victims' in crimes are not important. Crimes are crimes whether or not the victim wants them to be, and thus nothing the victim can do, before or after, can remove the actual criminality of the act. They are offenses against the state, not against the victim.

Victims can, of course, refuse to prosecute and often the law will leave it at that, because having a sympathetic victim testifying for the prosecution destroys the case. But almost everywhere has removed that ability from domestic abuse and will prosecute domestic abuse regardless of what the victim wants.

And, conversely, a victim participating in a binding arbitration for an actual crime, and not getting the outcome they want, might indeed screw up any civil cases, but it sure won't stop that person from then going to the police and reporting the actual crime.

My Comment of 5:39 should read, "In the context of inheritance, for example, what about gradnchildren on the female line?"

Will they have "chosen" to be dispossessed of half of a potential inheritance because their mother's participation was "voluntary"?

Considering that the mother could just write a will disinheriting them anyway, yeah, she can disclaim inheritance for her children. Anyone can, they don't need a special court, they just need to write a will.

Which is why it's near nonsensical worry that this court will be deciding inheritance issues anyway. The deceased and all his 'default' inheritors would have to agree to that in advance, and a much easier thing to do would be for the deceased to just write a will in the first place.

In fact, I'm sure there already is an 'Islamic will' template that explicitly states how property will be divided up after death that just coincidentally exactly follows Islamic law.

Here I'm recalling, albeit vaguely, constitutional challenges of inheritance laws based on illegitamacy, adoption, etc.

Those challenges, really, were over terms. If you divide your property equally among your three children, and it turns out you actually have another child, it is entirely likely the courts will, in fact, give all four children a fourth of your property.

As is what 'your children' means in the first place...in some places it's always meant 'All biological children', and in others it used to mean 'Legitimate children', until the courts found that unconstitutional. (I'm pretty sure it's always included adopted children...that's half the point of adoption!)

This is both for 'default', without-a-will inheritance, and with a sufficiently vague will, aka 'all my children', or whatever, at which point the courts will operate with the assumption you were trying to be 'fair'.

The 'illegitimacy' issue was just the courts recognizing that we have started regarding children as actual children of biological parents regardless of the state of the parent's marriages, so the default references to someone's children, in inheritance, needed to change to include them. (As opposed to them being at the end of the line, only inheriting if there were no legitimate heirs.) In much the same way that the law had previously changed the default to include women.

However, once you hit a certain specificity, the government really has no business interfering in inheritance. If you actually choose to leave all your property to one of your children, and nothing to the other, that's your business. If you choose to leave all your property to your male children, and none to your female children, the courts will award any male heirs that show up equally, including illegitimate ones, and no female ones at all. If you explicitly only include legitimate male children, that's what you get.

Presumably, if a shariah court in the US were given the authority to decide such cases, their decision would not be guided by fairness or equity,

And there entire point of my original post is that such a 'court' cannot be 'given' authority to decide anything. These are binding arbitration courts, and everyone involved must be willing to go to them. (Although, as I pointed out, all too often companies make such agreement part of doing business with them.)

To postulate this 'courts' involvement in interstate succession would require that everyone who could inherit under normal rules, and the deceased before his death, agreed to use them. And they they could get screwed up by some extra child popping up after his death who hadn't agreed to such rules. This is flatly absurd because if the deceased wished to use such rules all he'd have to do is write a will.

If you want to argue against binding arbitration courts, I'm all for that. They're horrible ideas. No one gets their own courts. If they want to set up their own contracts, fair enough, but they get debated in normal court.

I just find it rather absurd that suddenly conservatives are finding these courts are horrible things when there might be 'pressure' on women to abide by their decisions, when companies have been actually forcing people to agree to binding arbitration as a price of doing business for over a decade, and thus weaseling out of any form of liability towards their customers.

I also find it rather odd that you're still talking about inheritance. The only way that someone's will could possibly be arbitrated in such a court is if he'd stated it should be, in the will. (And, pretty much all the inheritors and anyone with a reasonable claim to the estate would have to agree, or it'd get bumped to a real court.)

And people can pretty much state whatever the hell they want in their own will, and it seems somewhat surreal that you keep, essentially, arguing they shouldn't be able to leave twice as much to their sons as daughters...aren't you guys supposed to be the 'leave us alone' party? If someone chooses to leave twice as much to one gender as the other, and appoint an organization that understands that decision as the will's executor, on what legal grounds, exactly, are you objecting to that? What constitutional principle does that violate?

Are you really attempting to argue that laws covering sexism should apply to private individuals? Do conservatives really want that?