Claims-making in court cases on children: Religion, ethnicity, and culture in cases of Dutch minority families against the state
Keywords:
Claims-making in court, cultural defense, reclamaciones ante los tribunales, defensa culturalAbstract
This paper focuses on cultural, religious, or ethnic claims made by family members in court cases against state institutions in the Netherlands. Based on an analysis of court judgements, I explore claims-making in cases regarding children from minority families in various fields of law. In the literature, such claims are often discussed in the context of the so-called cultural defence, where perpetrators of crimes make cultural claims to avoid or lessen punishment. However, family members may also make claims for exceptions of state policies, demand accommodation of particular practices, or to challenge discrimination by state institutions. The paper shows how Dutch courts are reluctant to engage with such claims, and often leave them out of court judgements entirely. I argue that this lack of engagement with cultural, religious, or ethnic claims should be understood in the context of general Dutch discourses of colour-blindness and assimilation of migrant minorities.
Este artículo se centra en los argumentos culturales, religiosos o étnicos presentados por miembros de familias en casos judiciales contra instituciones del Estado, en Holanda. Basándome en un análisis de las sentencias judiciales, estudio la presentación de argumentos en casos relacionados con niños de familias de minorías en varios campos jurídicos. En la literatura, dichos argumentos suelen comentarse en el contexto de la así denominada defensa cultural, donde los autores de delitos presentan argumentos culturales para eludir o disminuir el castigo. Sin embargo, también los miembros de familias pueden presentar argumentos para excepciones de políticas estatales, para solicitar la aceptación de determinadas prácticas, o para aducir discriminación por parte de instituciones del Estado. El artículo muestra cómo los tribunales holandeses son reacios a aceptar esos argumentos, y a menudo los excluyen totalmente de las sentencias. Aduzco que esta falta de implicación con argumentaciones culturales, religiosas o étnicas debería entenderse en el contexto de los discursos generales de Holanda sobre la asimilación de minorías migrantes.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1209
Downloads
Downloads:
PDF 215
XML 24
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Iris Sportel
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
OSLS strictly respects intellectual property rights and it is our policy that the author retains copyright, and articles are made available under a Creative Commons licence. The Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribution No-Derivatives licence is our default licence, further details available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 If this is not acceptable to you, please contact us.
The non-exclusive permission you grant to us includes the rights to disseminate the bibliographic details of the article, including the abstract supplied by you, and to authorise others, including bibliographic databases, indexing and contents alerting services, to copy and communicate these details.
For information on how to share and store your own article at each stage of production from submission to final publication, please read our Self-Archiving and Sharing policy.
The Copyright Notice showing the author and co-authors, and the Creative Commons license will be displayed on the article, and you must agree to this as part of the submission process. Please ensure that all co-authors are properly attributed and that they understand and accept these terms.