Is this legal?

Re: On Salelologa’s decision

Anyone who knows anything about Samoa should know that there is no way that anybody can just come into a village and set up a shop. 

The entire village is customary land. Therefore, you need a genealogical connection to that piece of land to even entertain the thought of setting up shop there.

For a “Chinese shop” to be set up, that Chinese person needs to be married into a Samoan family who owns that piece of customary land that a shop is to be set up on. In short, you need to at the very least be a faiava or nofotane of that village to even get a look in.

So by Salelologa making this rule, what they are actually saying is that they are banning all of their own Salelologa people who are married to Chinese from setting up shop on their own family’s customary land.

Is this even Constitutionally legal? Imagine the village coming and telling you that you cannot set up shop on your own family lands because of the race or the ethnicity of the person you happen to be married to? There would be an outrage if the government tried to introduce a law like that. Food for thought.

 

P.S. Jeffrey

Samoa Observer

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