ABSTRACT
Many Western funded initiatives seek to redesign justice in developing countries under the flag of ‘rule of law’ promotion. A long-standing critique against rule of law promotion activities for over 20 years is that the design and approach of such initiatives is ignorant of normative perceptions and understanding of law in the targeted societies, and thus fails to support incremental processes leading towards normative change. Moreover, it is striking that Western countries often do not heed their own advice in their own jurisdictions. This chapter looks at two cases of legally protected sexual taboos in Germany. While the first summarizes normative and social changes relating to the decriminalization of homosexuality, the second assesses the ongoing struggle against the still existing criminalization of incest, insofar as it relates to consensual sexual acts between adult siblings. Although both examples address a very similar issue, i.e., the decriminalization of sexual morality rooted in customs and religion, there is almost no reflection on how lessons learned in one earlier struggle can be carried over to the other. This ‘internal’ blindness repeats itself externally: while insisting that the former criminalization is a violation of universal human rights, the latter is not recognized as such.
