How can we unify common law with customary law in South Sudan?
3 min readBy Deng Mach Deng, Bor, South Sudan
April 11, 2016 (SSB) —- In my recent training with community stake holders on peaceful co-existence (collaborative dispute resolution) [CDR]. I found out that it will be hard to understand common law due to some reasons, especially on civil cases such divorce, force marriage, girl child education, adultery and misconception of human rights etc.
The argument was that some of the cases such as divorce should be done customarily citing common law as the one contributing to high rate of divorce, according to them divorce was the agreement between relatives of both parties whether to grant it or not, but currently there is nothing of that kind. More so, they accused judges on corruption that judges are being bribe and therefore, do not make absolute judgment hence high rate of divorce and too it is costly compare to local courts. In this regard as I witnessed some of the cases I do agreed with them.
In the recommendation, they said that divorce cases should be taken back to local courts because at the first place before the case reaches the court, counselling can be done to both the spouses and therefore easy to resettle the matter than going to court.
On the other hands, in order to reduce cases of adultery fines for adultery need to be increase from six cattle to the number they didn’t state, while they were reluctant on girl child education though some of them were insisting that girls are the resources of the community however, we convinced them that educating one girl is educating the entire nation and therefore, she can help more than she can do when she is illiterate. The question is; how can we sensitize the community in order to understand the importance of education and let their daughters go to school? I think it is the effort of everyone to help in sensitization of girl child education, however, there are number of issues we can discuss with community if we go deeply to the grassroots.
There is misconception of force marriage and human rights, when we talked of force marriage we means issues to do with torturing, intimidation, threat or/and unlawful confinement of girl in order to accept the man she doesn’t want to marry, and that is also applying to human right, in that way we mean that everything shouldn’t be done through fighting or force but through negotiation in order to convince each other for that matter, because at the end later if your daughter wasn’t consented in future she may divorce her husband and you will be the one suffering to compensate for the dowries paid. Therefore, it is good for both the parents and the daughter to have mutual agreement to avoid future problem.
All in all we need not to dwell much in western cultures and leave out our cultures, we take what is better and endorsed it into our culture.
Reach the author via his email address: Daniel Deng Mach <danieldengtior@gmail.com>
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