Suchergebnisse

Thetheme of this article is the decline of customary law in Upper Volta where, like most countries in Africa, customary courts operate side by side with the modern, ex-colonial legal system.1My study ofLe Tribunal de Premier Instancein Bobodioulasso suggests that customary courts may not in fact apply customary law. An examination of the criteria and the process by which decisions are reached here may help us to gain an insight into the function the Court serves for the community.

This book explores the legitimacy of political asylum applications in the US and UK through an examination of the varieties of evidence, narratives, and documentation with which they are assessed. Credibility is the central issue in determining the legitimacy of political asylum seekers, but the line between truth and lies is often elusive, partly because desperate people often have to use deception to escape persecution.

Many nations recognize the moral and legal obligation to accept people fleeing from persecution, but political asylum applicants in the twenty-first century face restrictive policies and cumbersome procedures. So, what counts as persecution? How do applicants translate their stories of suffering and trauma into a narrative acceptable to the immigration officials? How can asylum officials weed out the fake from the genuine without resorting to inappropriate cultural definitions of behaviour? Using both in depth accounts by asylum applicants and interviews with lawyers and other.

For immigration authorities, the goal of asylum hearings is to differentiate
between economic migrants and legitimate political asylum seekers. However,
in the stories asylum seekers tell, these categories often blur. Nevertheless, the
asylum process uses this differentiation to conceal inequities in the system, and
to justify denials. This article examines political asylum as a transnational and
culturally local process and argues that contradictions between protection and
control underlie some of the seemingly absurd denials of asylum applications.

Political asylum is one remedy for human rights abuses. By offering safe haven to people fleeing persecution in their homelands, countries providing political asylum acknowledge that violence can make some places too dangerous for members of particular groups. Asylum and human rights' discourses have run on parallel tracks in the post-World War II period, with the initial international recognition of human rights in 1948 (The Universal Declaration of Human Rights), followed by the1951 Refugee Convention. From the beginning, it was important that asylum law not conflict with the sanctity of the sovereign state. As a result, the treaties provide neither the means nor the political mandate to protect people from human rights abuses which are internal to sovereign states. Instead, asylum and refugee law provides one rather piecemeal and ineffective method of addressing such human rights abuses. It addresses human rights abuses on an individual basis and does not apply to many of those who, it could be argued, suffer from such abuses. Accordingly, it is a band aid rather than a potential solution to the problem of human rights, though it may serve the purpose of alerting the world to the existence of human rights abuses in a particular state. In this paper, Amy Schuman and Carol Bohmer explore the disconnect between asylum law and human rights at two levels. First, the relationship between written documentation and oral narrative testimony in political asylum hearings is examined as genres of representation that display and rely on different norms of evidence. Second, it is considered how these evidentiary differences exacerbate the impossible subjectivity of the asylum seeker, whose success in the process depends upon proving that she is who she says she is and that the atrocities she describes really happened. The paper also examines the question of when human rights should outweigh cultural traditions. What may be a human rights violation may not be grounds for asylum in such cases.

Political asylum is one remedy for human rights abuses. By offering safe haven to people fleeing persecution in their homelands, countries providing political asylum acknowledge that violence can make some places too dangerous for members of particular groups. Asylum law addresses human rights abuses on an individual basis and does not apply to many of those who, it could be argued, suffer from such abuses. Discourses about human rights abuses play a significant role in particular political asylum cases. It has been argued that a human rights vision of refugee law would refocus away from the provision of individual sanctuary in the host country and toward an emphasis on the refugee's right to return to his country of origin to live a life without human rights abuses. In this paper, we first briefly discuss the history of political asylum policy in relation to its connection to human rights, and then turn to a particular case in which the violations of human rights are unquestionable but the individual's application was twice denied before being granted asylum status. We examine in depth the case of a woman who fled Cameroon to the US where she claimed asylum. We argue that these denials illustrate the ways in which credibility concerns and the asylum hearing officers' reliance on scenarios that meet their assumptions and expectations often outweigh an assessment of the human rights violations involved in the case.

AbstractThis article examines the functioning of divorce mediation in a state where a significant proportion of the mediators are attorneys. We argue that divorce mediation in Georgia differs from other states in the extent to which it is integrated into the legal system. We conclude that the presence of a significant number of attorneys‐mediators has transformed both the practice of divorce mediation and the practice of divorce law in Georgia. Mediation is more like the practice of law, and the practice of law is more like mediation.