The 18th PJC meeting attendees includes the chief justices of various Pacific islands, including Tonga, Solomon Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna, Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand.
The previous meeting was held in Nuku’alofa, Tonga in Nov. 2007.
This year, the top item on the agenda is finding ways of solving land disputes with the joint input of common law and local traditional chiefly systems.
“In the Pacific region, land is the cornerstone of culture and civilization. The problem is there to see how we can sort out the disputes between customary law and ‘imported’ common law, because those two systems and their values are often on a conflicting mode,” Pape’ete Appeal Court First President Olivier Aimot told local media.
He said one of the key issues is to attempt to harmonize the two notions, probably through an increased involvement and integration of custom values in a modern environment.
