HOWZAT

The report is an important contribution to the debate fuelled last year by comments of Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, then Lord Chief Justice. Both suggested that Sharia courts had a role in the settlement of disputes through alternative dispute resolution (ADR).

But in a foreword to the report, Neil Addison, a barrister, points out an apparent confusion between the two ADR methods of mediation and arbitration. Mediation is an attempt to help parties to reach a solution and is not regulated by statute; arbitration is a court-imposed decision and covered by the Arbitration Act

Lord Phillips, writes Addison, saw “no reason why principles of Sharia, or any other religious code, should not be the basis for mediation”. Sharia courts, however, are run by the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal that is covered by the Arbitration Act. So the tribunal is not engaged in mediation but in arbitration, Addison says.

If the UK family courts were truly presented with a mediated agreement in a child’s best interests, the court would register it and enforce it.

But women are not equal in Sharia and Sharia does not contain a specific commitment to the best interests of the child, as is fundamental in family law in Britain. So, Addison asks, would such a decision really be a mediated agreement? Or does it involve acquiescence by the woman in a Sharia rule that does not explicitly consider the interests of the child?

Addison concludes that “the attempt to extend Sharia arbitration to family disputes under the misleading title ‘mediation’ is a potential misuse of both arbitration and family law”.

The debate is not all about terminology. It is far more fundamental. As the report’s author, Denis MacEoin, an academic and specialist in Islamic studies, points out: “This is not a matter of eating halal meat or seeking God’s blessing on one’s marriage.”

It is “a challenge to what we believe to be the rights and freedoms of the individual, to our concept of a legal system based on what Parliament enacts” and to the right of everyone to live in a society free from ethnic-religious division or claims to superiority, or special “above-the-law” status.

The report calls for Sharia rulings to be excluded from their present recognition under the Arbitration Act 1996. Meanwhile, Green notes that comments such as those by Lord Phillips or Dr Williams are damaging to the debate.

Far from helping integration, any further encouragement of Sharia will, he says, only “undermine the efforts of British Muslims struggling to evolve a version of Islam consistent with a tolerant and pluralistic society”.

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