Abstract:
This paper looks at the need for judges in Pacific courts to have a greater engagement with cultural values when interpreting constitutional rights. Almost all Pacific nations have supreme law constitutions, and almost all of these contain rights provisions of some description. The relevance of these rights provisions being enshrined in supreme law documents is that decisions and actions of the executive government, the legislature and other decision-making (and often democratically elected) bodies can be challenged and overturned on the basis of being inconsistent with those rights. The mandate for constitutional rights to be used in this way is far more clear than for rights that are not constitutionally recognised, and the inclusion of these rights in domestic supreme law documents gives them a relevance to the local law not necessarily shared by non-constitutionally recognised rights.
