It was a warm, quiet morning in Papua New Guinea on 15 August, 2017 when four young students surrounded the house of Galang Waiseuk, a man they held responsible for the death of their brother. The four students broke into his house and chopped him up with bush knives, killing him in front of his wife and two children. By the standards of liberal constitutionalism, with its emphasis on the Right to Life and the state's monopoly on force, this was a clear case of murder. Yet the defendants explained to the court that Waiseuk was a known sorcerer, widely believed to be practicing dangerous witchcraft. Killing him was, in their view, merely an act of self-preservation for themselves and their village to stop further rituals and the consumption of their souls. This tension formed the core of the legal debate facing Acting Judge John Bernard Kaumi in presiding over 2018's The State v. Bobby Dakol, a landmark case which, once again, brought into focus Papua New Guinea's constant struggle between Westminster principles and Melanesian customary law.

This case lays bare a recurring legal question in Papua New Guinea: Can a Constitution grounded in liberal rights coexist with a plural legal system that sanctions customary beliefs, such as sorcery? PNG's Constitution attempts to find this balance, promising rights such as life, liberty, and protection from inhumane treatment while also incorporating customary law. Issues arise when those customs clash with liberal principles (as they often do in cases of sorcery-related violence), and the state's constitutional promises begin to show cracks.

The country faces profound tensions between its liberal constitutional framework and its deeply rooted traditional belief systems. The constitution's attempt to reconcile liberal individual rights with Melanesian customary law via Schedule 2.1.1 - Recognition of Custom creates a structural tension that becomes unmanageable in practice due to asymmetries in enforcement and differences in ethical foundations. This legal incoherence, most vividly exposed through the examination of Sorcery Accusation Related Violence (SARV), undermines state legitimacy and democratization by leaving a legal void that drives citizens towards vigilante justice.

But this is not solely a conflict between law and culture, this is a design-level contradiction. The Constitution elevates two incompatible normative orders to coequal status without attempting to resolve how it is that they interact and coexist. Liberal individual rights demand equality, dignity, and state monopoly on force. Customary justice, especially in the context of sorcery, often demands community retribution without a basis in material evidence. The result is a system in which constitutional authority is fragmented. Papua New Guinea's hybrid legal system tries, but often fails, to reconcile modern constitutionalism with customary beliefs in sorcery.

The Sorcery Act and Its Repeal

Enacted in 1971 under Australian colonial rule, The Sorcery Act criminalized the practice of sorcery as well as false accusations of sorcery, yet it also gave legal credence to sorcery-related killings by allowing sorcery to be used as a partial defense in murder trials. This legal ambiguity mirrored the political goal of the constitution-making process: accommodate both Western law and Melanesian custom.

That ambiguity led to the collapse of the system when in 2013 Kepari Leniata, a 20-year-old mother accused of witchcraft, was burned alive. Her death sparked national outrage. In response, Parliament repealed the Sorcery Act and amended the Criminal Code to include harsher penalties for sorcery-related violence, including eligibility for the death penalty. Although an accomplishment on paper as it marked a shift toward constitutional rights and state-based law, the reality is that violence did not stop.

Sorcery Accusation Related Violence Today

SARV has actually grown worse in many rural areas. Victims, most often women, are still accused, tortured, and killed based on little more than suspicion within their communities. Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has called the abhorrent levels of violence against women in the country a 'humanitarian crisis'. Villages often see these acts as righteous instead of criminal due to prevailing beliefs regarding the evils of witchcraft. It's not just that state law fails to reach these areas, but more significantly that customary beliefs provide their own ethical code. When state law contradicts it, people have often ignored the state.

Even in high-profile SARV cases, crimes sometimes go unpunished. In the aftermath of Leniata's killing, and later in the Bobby Dakol case, police made arrests but courts struggled. In both instances, witnesses vanished, communities refused to work with authorities, and it was extremely difficult to secure convictions. Amnesty International made it clear that "the failure of the Papua New Guinea authorities to bring the killers of a woman who was burned alive to justice, underlines their complete failure to address sorcery-related attacks".

Custom, the Constitution, and the Repugnancy Clause

PNG's Constitution tries to balance modern rights with local tradition through Schedule 2, a section which allows courts to apply customary law so long as it's not "repugnant to the general principles of humanity." That is the basis for the Repugnancy Clause: a colonial remnant designed to filter out abusive customs while also keeping the law culturally relevant and therefore tied to the populace and enforceable. While the clause's purpose is to maintain a constitutional filter against rights-violating practices, its undefined language and weak jurisprudential development within PNG mean that it functions more as a form of abstract guideline as opposed to actionable legal doctrine. Since courts rarely apply it decisively, and since in many regions cases never reach formal adjudication, its influence is rather slim.

This debacle leaves a patchwork of legal authority. For example, violent actions may be justified under customary norms by one judge in a specific province, while another might rule that these actions directly contradict constitutional protections. Local councils often resolve such cases informally, and state institutions fail to intervene effectively in order to create a uniform legal system. Unlike India, which restricts custom largely to civil matters, or Nigeria, which demarcates Sharia jurisdictions, PNG's attempt to universalize a hybrid legal framework leads to friction between national and local norms as well as instability and lack of uniformity in justice systems.

A Crisis of Legitimacy

The problems created by the Schedule 2 crisis create significant democratic risk for PNG and are a serious existential threat. A constitution's legitimacy depends on its reach, both in the legal realm and in the ethical one. In PNG, the Constitution is respected in the capital, in the courts, and on paper. Yet in remote provinces where sorcery killings are common, the legal importance of this document is often irrelevant. When citizens turn to communal justice instead of the police and when they feel they must murder in order to preserve social harmony, it signals a significant legal failure, and even more importantly, a crisis of faith in the state and institutions. The law exists but is useless as local beliefs frequently override it. A constitution that cannot offer authoritative resolution between competing systems of justice cannot claim universal legitimacy. Its authority becomes conditional on context, confined to the urban, the literate, and the secular. Without public backing of the Constitution and legal authorities, the system itself becomes symbolic.

Efforts have been made to bridge this gap, including the government's 2015-2018 Sorcery National Action Plan (SNAP) and multiple public awareness campaigns. The government has changed their focus from attempting to lead communities away from beliefs in sorcery to a general anti-violence message. Churches, NGOs, and community leaders have launched initiatives countrywide to shift attitudes and offer protection to victims. But without deeper engagement with belief systems, stronger state presence, consistent enforcement of laws, and the formalization of a coherent, state-based criminal justice framework, these reforms will continue to fall short.

PNG's experiment in hybrid constitutionalism reveals both the ambition and fragility of trying to graft liberal principles onto a deeply pluralistic society. Sorcery violence in PNG is much more than a criminal issue, it is also a reflection of legal dualism and the problems brought about by weak statehood. The country's Constitution is strong in theory, but in the places where it is needed most, it falls completely silent. This is not because the people reject law, but because the law has failed to earn legitimacy within the confines of their ethical framework. Until the state can build trust and authority in places where its Constitution currently has no traction, the dream of universally protected rights in Papua New Guinea will remain out of reach.