Legalities unbound? Assessing the role of religion and legal pluralism at four UN human rights committees

Abstract

International human rights law (ihrl) has traditionally enjoyed an uneasy relationship with customary, religious, and indigenous forms of law. International courts and tribunals have considered these non-state forms of law to represent both structural and material challenges to the implementation of human rights norms at the domestic level. Over the course of the last decades, however, the theory and practice of human rights has increasingly started recognizing and accommodating multiple legal orders. This article traces the gradually increasing accommodation of legal pluralism in ihrl in the monitoring practice of four un human rights committees over a period of 20 years, looking in particular at the increasing recognition of religious forms of legality across the committees.