Sharia and Beth Din courts in the UK: is legal pluralism nothing more than a necessary political fiction?

Abstract

Since 2008, sharia courts were postulated that they may be positive for  the English law and for English justice in general, to facilitate for a more  pluralist legal system in which people can choose which law they wish to  comply with, religious or English one. This idea was recognized as very  controversial. Anyway the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal, supposed to operate  within a civil jurisdiction, was established already in 2007. MAT is treated  as any other alternate dispute resolution tribunal, what means that parties  can consent to have their disputes decided by a third party and that these  decisions are recognized in an English court. It is very important that abuse  has, until fairly recently, often been seen as a matter of private rather than  public law within the English system and this delineation between public  and private family matters has been maintained by Muslim law to a large  extent. The concern raised by the use of private arbitration in the field of  domestic violence is that it undermines the role of the state to prosecute  offences which a society find particularly abhorrent. A possible safeguard  for victims of domestic violence in the face of Sharia or Jewish the Beth  Din jurisdiction is the requirement of independent legal advice for both  parties before acquiescing to Sharia as the Beth Din.