Samizdata

Once the financial markets have hopefully calmed down, this development is likely to gain much greater significance:

Five sharia courts have been set up in London, Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester and Nuneaton, Warwickshire. The government has quietly sanctioned that their rulings are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court. Previously, the rulings were not binding and depended on voluntary compliance among Muslims.

What has been predicted has come to pass. As I discussed on a previous post while attacking the Archbishop of Canterbury and a senior UK judge on the matter, this move undermines the core principle of a free society, namely, that all are equal under the rule of law, and that a polycentric legl code, while fine in theory, tends to be unacceptable in practice if some people, such as Muslim women, are at risk of being coerced by their families into submitting to such courts. Given that in matrimonial disputes, men are favoured over women under Muslim law, this development is bad for women. Now, where is the chorus of complaint from feminists?

The article continues:

Muslim tribunal courts started passing sharia judgments in August 2007. They have dealt with more than 100 cases that range from Muslim divorce and inheritance to nuisance neighbours. It has also emerged that tribunal courts have settled six cases of domestic violence between married couples, working in tandem with the police investigations.

In tandem?

The rulings of arbitration tribunals are binding in law, provided that both parties in the dispute agree to give it the power to rule on their case.

That has to be the crucial point, but the worry must be that women, for example, will face considerable pressure in marital disputes to submit – that is what Islam means – to sharia law. The whole point about everyone being under the same legal code is that pressure is at least lessened somewhat.

This comment was telling:

In a recent inheritance dispute handled by the court in Nuneaton, the estate of a Midlands man was divided between three daughters and two sons. The judges on the panel gave the sons twice as much as the daughters, in accordance with sharia. Had the family gone to a normal British court, the daughters would have got equal amounts.

Well, exactly. Now that the Tories are miles ahead in the opinion polls, it would not be too much to ask for a future Tory administration to shut these courts down if it can be shown that parties to a dispute had been under any duress to accept them in the first place. Also, where children are involved and therefore the child is clearly not able to consent, such rulings should be declared inadmissable, period. The same point would apply to any other network of courts or arbitrators from any other religion, for that matter. For example, as far as I understand it, Jewish courts do not have binding powers if they are at odds with the existing UK ones.

At the very least, this development plays straight into the hands of bigots of all stripes, including the Far Right, of course. Equality before the law may sometimes be an empty phrase, but it touches on a vital principle in jurispudence in a free society.

Another senior UK figure – one of the most senior judges in the land – has argued that some aspects of Sharia law should be permissable when it comes to settling certain disputes between Muslim couples. This re-ignites the controversy sparked by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who argued for the same.

Once more, the bedrock principle of a liberal order, that men and women should be treated equally before the law, is potentially at odds with a code that, by definition, does not accept this equality as part of its essence. The inherently anti-women bias of Sharia is not a bug, it is a feature. Take cases where, for instance, a young English guy who is an atheist or Christian tries to take a Muslim girl out on a date and the latter gets physically intimidated by her family (this is not a hypothetical situation, it has happened). To what authority should the woman or man appeal in dealing with such cases? Unless the judge is able to answer that sort of hard question, which goes to the heart of why sharia is considered unworkable in a liberal order, the judge would be well advised to focus on his core responsibility, of seeing that justice is done under the laws of this land. This is one of those examples of why I do not think that a polycentric legal order can really work unless it is possible for its members to elect to choose under which code they wish to be treated. Muslim women would not have that choice if sharia law was incorporated. More importantly, they do not have the key right of “exit”, the right to choose no longer to be treated under a specific code of their families.

The judge, like the Archbishop, is proof to radical Islamists that some of the most senior figures in what might pass for the British Establishment lack the intellectual or moral fibre to defend the core values of this nation.