Family Land Rights Tree (FLRT): A tool to reliably prove customary land rights
- 25 July 2014 -
- Written by Laspnet
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Following an internal reflection within the Land and Equity Movement in Uganda (LEMU) in December 2013 on its role in land rights promotion, the organization realized that, whilst it works to build the capacity of land administrators such as the clans, the police and the courts, when it came to mediation work, it undertook it directly with the parties and unintentionally had been undermining the clans. LEMU had previously worked with clans only as witnesses and meeting mobilisers. This reflection also coincided with the Northern Uganda Land Platform (NULP) research on “uprooting bad faith: the quest for appropriate land dispute resolution in Northern Uganda” in October, 2013 which recommended that “NGOs are advised to use their efforts and resources to reinforce existing traditional and state institutions, rather than create justice alternatives that compete with these long-term actors”.
In this effect, LEMU has devised the Family Land Rights Tree (FLRT) as a tool to reliably prove customary land rights. FLRT tool is the process of a family drawing the members of its families, basing on their marital statuses and other relationships, whether they live or are deceased; age and how land rights were passed on from generations.Previously, LEMU relied on information given by the parties and had no way of knowing whether the witnesses were not giving false testimony, the relationships of the conflicting parties or whether the witnesses were not discriminating against a party to the conflict due to distant relationships.
LEMU discussed and agreed that when land cases are received, they would request for the clan committee names and organize training in which the clans will first identify land rights of the parties by a simple technique of facilitating the drawing and the analysis of their family land rights tree which gives details of the origins and presents family land rights.
The FLRT has been put into effect because customary land tenure normally uses a system without official title documentation and this becomes even more difficult especially when third parties are involved. Having no documentation by a customary land owner is one of the reasons policy makers support titling and conversion of customary land to freehold.
The family land rights tree is used to analyse which party had land rights, which relative on the family tree is likely to know the facts of the case, which relative should be considered a witness. The FLRT also ascertains if there is greed, discrimination and exploitation of some other vulnerabilities which would make the conflict more of land grabbing than genuine good faith land conflict.
The family land rights tree tool does not give information on attempts made by land rights conflicting parties to get justice and this information still needs to be requested, but apart from this, LEMU recommends the family land rights tree tool for all actors involved in land rights conflict resolution in customary tenure because of the benefits given above. This way, the outcomes of mediation will be transparent, accountable and appealable and land rights decisions will have a chance to deliver justice.
