On The Civil Disputes And Settlement Mechanism In Southwestern Ethnic Areas

Southwest ethnic minorities are mostly located in the mountain areas, the infrastructure,transportation, education and other relatively backward of which are poorly developed. By theabove factors, the law has a very limited influence in the region–not every corner could beactually governed by laws and regulations. Nevertheless, the region’s ethnic minorities stilllive a life of order. In various villages of the Southwest, it is not just a relatively independentself-governing entity, it is also a mutual dependencies between social groups. In addition tothe use of legal adjustment of civil disputes, Southwest Ethnic Minorities also use their owntraditional norms of customary law and practices handed down from ancient to deal with thevarious disputes among themselves to ensure their unit group’s stability and harmony. Civildisputes in the Southwest Ethnic Minorities are mainly marriage and family relations disputes,forest ownership disputes, neighborhood disputes, and some small economic disputes.With the continuous development of China’s economy, a large number of groups ofdifferent interests, diversification of the main causes of the ethnic minority areas of civildisputes, are becoming increasingly diversified. The diversity of civil disputes will inevitablyrequire a wide range of dispute settlement mechanism. In this case, in addition to national laws and regulations as the conventional dispute settlement mechanism, the new disputesettlement mechanism should also be taken seriously. Among these different disputeresolution mechanisms, the parties will usually choose the non-litigation dispute resolutionmechanisms. That is because those dispute resolution mechanisms have advantages such ashigher potential to resolve disputes, economic efficiency and lower costs. In contrast, thetraditional customary law norms and national laws often seem relatively stiff and lack offlexibility in dealing with disputes, thus when dealing with customary law, the non-litigationdispute resolution mechanisms are more acceptable for both parties. In Southwest ethnicminority areas, non-litigation dispute resolution mechanism, on the one hand, could ease thepressure of Court, improve the efficiency of dispute resolution; on the other hand, couldovercome the lengthy process in the litigation process, reducing the litigation costs of theparties and therefore saves the country of scarce judicial resources. The improvement of thevarious dispute resolution mechanisms has brought a lot of convenience for citizens inresolving civil dispute, and also provided a strong guarantee for national stability andeconomic development.With the promoted national legal system construction, in Minority areas in the southwest,many ordinary civil disputes are now resolved by national law. However, as a result of thespecial social habits and customs of Southwest minority areas, the adjustment of national lawis not able to reach every aspect of the local life. That is to say, the intensity of promotion ofthe national legal system in Southwest minority areas is far less than that in the cities.In Minority areas in the southwest, a dispute or case is often not only between the parties, itmight be between families or even villages. For religion and belief reasons, there aredifferences between different ethnic groups, and sometimes simple civil disputes handledinappropriately may easily lead to large-scale group conflicts. In Southwest ethnic minorityareas, most people have a strong national consciousness; they are used to handle disputes viaa sense of fairness and a natural sense of justice. In this case, it is very likely to be conflictsbetween norms of customary law and the influence of national habits and awareness of thenational law. These disputes could be related to the stability of the ethnic minority areas andsustainable development. However, the ultimate goal of either the country’s legal norms,norms or minority areas of customary law is to reach a reasonable solution to a variety of civildisputes, to achieve fairness and justice. Thus, when dealing with civil disputes inSouthwest Ethnic Minorities, on the one hand, we should follow the norms of national law, be bounded by the law, not contrary to the premise of the basic principles of nationallaw, on the other hand, we should also make appropriate modifications based on the actualsituation of the ethnic minority areas. And this, hopefully will help in mediations andjudgments of those disputes, and will strive to achieve harmony in national lawand customary law norms.