When a Berlin court reduced the manslaughter sentence of a Somali man because he had paid ‘blood money’ to his victim’s family, the story passed largely under the radar of the media. Yet it speaks to a dangerous development.
Western Europeans are growing increasingly alert to the threat of ‘two-tier justice’ and ‘two-tier policing,’ where ethnicity or political opinions (or both) serve as the basis for differential treatment within criminal law. This observation could be applied to all levels of decision-making, ranging from police deployments and arrests to bail conditions and sentencing.
Whereas European justice systems may differ—from the French inquisitorial approach to its adversarial English counterpart—both have historically revolved around the individual as a legal subject. Indeed, when such legal frameworks have treated the accused as part of a group, and therefore a criminal ‘type,’ miscarriages of justice have followed. What is striking about the nascent ‘two-tier’ arrangements is that they rest on the differential treatment of whole groups of people. Whether or not said groups benefit from this, it is certainly detrimental to justice as a whole.
Enter Sharia law and related Islamic legal practices. The precedents are concerning: what if a ‘blood money’ payment was prepared in advance of a premeditated action that took a life? Would the penalties be reduced? Could a non-Somali/non-Ethiopian/non-Muslim use the example of “Abdi A.” in Berlin Regional Court to plead a sentence down by paying off their victim’s family? This one case of differential treatment, which netted the accused a mere four-years of imprisonment for manslaughter, could have far reaching implications.
Could it be that the legal system even welcomes the capacity of parallel “judiciaries” to take over some of its workload? This seems to be the case in Britain already, where warnings about the growth of separate, parallel Sharia ‘legal system’—notorious for its rulings on family law by, for instance, insisting that Muslim women produce multiple male witnesses to support their claims. Official indifference has led to at least 85 such councils ,making Britain into the ‘Sharia capital of the West,’ according to critics, while the authorities further sleepwalk into social segregation: a situation made worse by the European Union’s failure to condemn the practice.
In a growing number of deportation cases, appeals, including those from convicted criminals, have pointed to local cultural practices in the area of ‘civil society’ to show why deportation would infringe on their human rights (as interpreted under the European Convention on Human Rights), from tattoos to regional variations in the taste of chicken nuggets. No doubt some will find future Sharia rulings to fall back on when faced with a gullible immigration tribunal.
However, special pleading based on religiously initiated blood money payments crosses a line precisely because it moves from civil to criminal law. It is already a problem to have two-tier justice, whether with arrests or bail conditions. Permitting selective religious practices to serve as mitigating circumstances would be a step too far.
