On The Protection Of Minority Cultural Rights By Customary Law

As a unified country of fifty six ethnic groups with a long history, China has created its splendid distinctive ethnic culture and formed its diverse customary laws. Through some graveyard ownership dispute cases happening in minority areas, the article tries to discuss the connections and conflicts that exist between the customary laws and the national laws. The article will further elaborate on a discussion of the necessity as well as the possibility from the perspective of cultural rights protection and explore specific ways for the protection of ethnic group cultural rights in this new era.The article includes seven parts. The introduction part clarified selection cause and meaning of this article, the domestic and foreign research articles and theories, also the research methods and the innovation and shortage of it. The first chapter starts with two similar graveyard ownership cases which got totally different results. Through analyzing, the author fond that the root cause is the conflict between the customary laws and the national laws and come up with a question:Whether or not the customary laws of ethnic groups should be and can be use in a lawsuit by the judge, and if possible, how? In order to solve this problem, the author discussed the hidden culture information of these two cases in chapter two, and further analysis the importance and legitimacy of culture rights that contend in ethnic costume. Chapter three discusses the connections and conflicts that exist between the customary laws and the national laws and try to find the possibility of debugging. The main point of chapter four is learning the foreign experience and develops cultural rights protection in China. On the basis of former parts, the author raise an idea in the last chapter that we could take good use of local customs to protect the cultural rights of ethnic groups by introducing the customary laws into the litigation as well as developing a multi-dispute-solve system.