The Journal of Law, Social Justice and Global Development

Ensuring That no Child is Left Behind

Erica Harper — 2024-04-04

This paper evaluates how customary justice systems align with juvenile justice standards as set out in the Beijing Rules. It considers a dataset of 3,894 interviews conducted by the Terre des hommes foundation with 259 customary actors in Afghanistan, Egypt, Lebanon, Burkina Faso, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It is argued that reforming customary systems to better resemble access to justice mechanisms — at least from a child welfare perspective — may be wrongheaded. Instead, customary justice systems might be conceptualised as a potential juvenile justice tool. From an efficiency and scalability perspective, such an approach has intuitive appeal. As well as handling a majority of dispute resolution, these systems naturally divert children away from formal legal processes, shield them from detention, facilitate rehabilitation and promote reintegration. The question should hence be how current policies and programming might be reconceptualized to capitalize on customary justice systems as a response to the deficits in juvenile justice in the developing world.

Comunalidad, Development and Indigenous Rights in Oaxaca, Mexico

Rosie Doyle — 2024-04-05

In the 1980s, in the Southern State of Oaxaca in Mexico, a group of civil society organisations, anthropologists and indigenous intellectuals posed a challenge to state-led development. They engaged with the long history of colonialism and injustices faced by indigenous Mexicans, analysed the changing nature of the relationship between local indigenous and rural communities and the state, and proposed a renovation of communal practice and the development of autonomous government based on consensual decision making as a basis for an alternative anti-poverty strategy. They called this Comunalidad, and supporters of Comunalidad engaged with the emerging indigenous rights legislation. Comunalidad can be understood in the context of the Latin American anti-development, anti-capitalist tradition. The movements and projects established as part of the movement have been effective in developing community identity and defending the cultural autonomy of communities in the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca. Understanding Oaxacan Comunalidad is important for getting at the 'narrative behind the numbers' of contemporary development policy. Comunalidad anti-poverty strategies revolved around community development rather than economic development and serve as a useful example of a local approach to development.

An Islamic Game Theory approach for overcoming base erosion profit shifting challenges for the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC)

Klemens Katterbauer — 2024-04-04

BEPS (Base erosion and profit shifting) challenges have been present between the countries of the OIC for a considerable period of time, leading to significant tax losses to its societies. This has further led to challenges, as tax dues, demanded by Islamic law, are not collected. In this situation, corporations and individuals aim to exploit tax benefits in order to minimise their overall taxation. We here present a new framework integrating Game theory and Islamic values for addressing the challenges with BEPS for the OIC. The framework outlines seven key strategies in order to address BEPS issues, resolving the potential tax abuses by corporations while maintaining closer alignment with Islamic values. Furthermore, our framework provides a deep learning cooperative game theory model for the optimisation of the tax rates in the multilateral taxation agreement in order to create the most overall benefit for all participants of the OIC.