Unable to enforce sharia safeguards
Re Sharia tribunals and human rights Editorial, Sept. 8.
In your editorial, you claim that religious tribunals are okay and using sharia is okay providing a long list of protections are in place. But that is exactly the problem. Those protections sound good on paper and that is where they will stay. They will never be applied because the government has neither the personnel nor the money to enact them. Do we have informed legal personnel who will be able to sit privately with a Muslim woman who speaks no English and take the hours needed to explain Ontario family law to her and to make certain that she understands those laws? And to explain to her the options that she in fact has? And to assure her that she will not be ostracized by her family, her friends and her community if she chooses to opt for the law of the land? Do we have the social staff and funds to explain to her that she will be protected if she goes against the wishes of her husband, her brother, her son? Can we provide her with that protection? Do we have the legal staff to examine every issue proposed for arbitration? Do we have the staff to evaluate whether or not the women in question have been fully informed and have truly made a free choice? Do we have the staff to examine every arbitration decision to ensure that it is not outside the laws of the land before it becomes ‘ legal’? Those are the proposed precautions and only a fool would suggest that we have the means to implement them.
Furthermore, the Arbitration Act is designed to free up the courts and to save time. With properly enacted precautions, it would take much longer for a case under arbitration than it would under the secular courts of the land. There is nothing wrong with religious matters being brought to arbitration, but only when there is no existing law that covers the matters contested.
If family law were removed from the Arbitration Act, then all women would be treated equally and fairly by the laws of the land. Those laws were put into place because communities and families were not treating their women fairly — because women were oppressed by the men in command of their particular community.
All religions could then use the Arbitration Act to deal with whatever they chose — but not family law. Elka Ruth Enola, Oakville