Fostering New Child Rights Constituencies: Leveraging Knowledge on Customary Justice Systems

This Seminal Report is the first to provide evidence about the landscape of customary justice processes, based on an in-depth study of 3,894 children’s cases dealt with by customary justice systems in Lebanon, Jordan, the Palestinian Territories (West Bank and the Gaza Strip), Afghanistan, Egypt, and Burkina Faso. Across these territories, this report aims to contribute to the understanding of the complex ways in which informal justice systems impact the children who participate in them, either as victims or perpetrators. This avant-garde action-oriented research was carried out by Terres des hommes (Tdh) over a sixyear period from October 2013 to June 2019, in close collaboration with customary justice actors. Tdh is an international humanitarian umbrella organisation operating to contribute to global action and research that aims to foster and preserve children’s rights across many spheres, including access to justice.

The Seminal Report is structured into six chapters: Chapter 1 provides a detailed explanation of the data collection and methodology and its limitations; Chapter 2 focuses on an accurate description of the customary justice system, its actors, and its functioning; Chapter 3 explores the profile of children and families who resort to customary justice proceedings; Chapter 4 dives into customary justice proceedings and how they operate in children’s cases, describing the types of cases, interactions with other justice systems, sources of custom, religion and state laws used by the customary actors, as well as the investigation methods and case outcomes delivered; Chapter 5 analyzes the opportunities and risk that children face when accessing customary justice proceedings, giving a ’pride of place’ to different forms of participation of children in those systems; and finally, Chapter 6 presents the major findings and contributions to knowledge and discussion from this mixed methods and analytical study of customary justice systems aiming at enabling new (and better) ways of approaching and contextualizing children’s access to justice.

This Seminal Report has been compiled through the partnership with Terre des hommes and the Disrupting Violence Beacon at Griffith University. It is the belief of these organizations that the uniqueness of the data and its analysis provided in the Seminal Report will be paramount to accelerating a focused agenda and action into child-centered justice having the centrality of customary justice systems and making the case for much needed linkages between formal and customary justice system to ensure justice with and for children.