Customary Justice
So far, working at USIP has been an incredible experience. The people I interact with everyday all have unique backgrounds and life stories. One of my colleagues started his career in the Balkans to establish transitional justice mechanisms. Another one worked at the United Nations and developed international counter-terrorism policies. Both speak multiple languages—as nearly everyone else in the building. In fact, I’ve probably been hearing more foreign languages than English.
The work I’ve been focusing on for the past two weeks also involves foreign languages. Doing research on the Burkinabe judiciary has enabled me to dust off my French and to look into the inner workings of a civil law system. While finding information on the courts and recent legislation is no easy task—the two government’s websites that contain all the laws do not work—the system is fascinating.
As I was working on a case study on land dispute for a baseline workshop, I found a law from 2009 that mixed civil law and customary law. One of the articles stated that land ownership was to be determined by community recognition. Since land is sacred in the Faso’s ancestral cultures, customary authorities, communities, and landowners must all agree on ownership before one’s title can be recognized. The second line of this same article, however, stated that the formal justice system has power to decide ownership questions when rural lands have been positively exploited for at least thirty years.
This simple law, which tries to marry traditional values with a rule of law, exemplifies how these two cultures can sometimes clash. What happens, for instance, if a judge gives title to one party who has been exploiting a parcel for thirty years, but the community and village chief agree that ownership belongs to someone else? This is what my team has been trying to gauge in order to understand the population’s reticence in accessing the formal justice system.