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Developing Mongolia's Legal Framework: A Needs Analysis
General BackgroundMongolia is a large landlocked country situated on the northern plateau of Central Asia. Roughly three times the size of France, it covers an area of 600,000 square miles and has a populaton of only 2,200,000. Half of the inhabitants are under the age of 20 and approximately 650,000 people live in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar. The extreme continental climate means a short temperate summer followed by a lengthy winter with temperatures well below freezing. While there has been some industrial development, livestock breeding and crop farming remain the mainstays of the Mongolian economy. The physical infrastructure is not well developed. Many small settlements have no power supply or heating. Telecommunications are limited but improving. Few roads outside the cities are paved, and with the vast distances vehicular transport is slow. The only major train line connects Mongolia with Russia and China. There are also regular flights to Russia, China and Kazakhstan, with further links anticipated. The recent link up with the Internet means that Mongolia is now connected in another way to the rest of the world. The end of Soviet domination in 1990 and the collapse of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), whose member states were Mongolia's main trading partners, forced Mongolia to begin what has been a rapid transition to a market economy. While Mongolia was theoretically independent, it had been very much subject to Russian influence for 70 years and its economic, social, political and legal institutions were closely modelled on those of the Soviet Union. During that period Mongolia adopted the civil law tradition of many European countries. Mongolia's earlier legal traditions are less clear. From the twelfh century onwards, particularly under such famous rulers as Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan, Mongolia had been subject to customary law, much of it apparently unwritten. By the fifteenth century, the area that is modern-day Mongolia had broken into a number of separate, and often warring, khanates. Tibetan Buddhism gained ascendary in the sixteenth century, and thereafter Mongolia came increasingly under the influence of the new Manchu dynasty in China. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries an alliance of Buddhist theocracy and secular Mongol aristocracy ruled Mongolia under Manchu suzerainty. The vast majority of Mongolians lived simply as either nomadic herders or monks. After the Chinese revolution of 1911, Mongolia declared its independence, subsequently becoming in 1924 the world's second communist state. This marked the beginning of the lengthy period of Soviet domination. Under communism, reminders of Mongolia's Buddhist past were ruthlessly suppressed. In comparison with most other CMEA states, Mongolia is therefore making the transition to a western-style economy after a longer experimentation with a command economy, with less historical experience in the operation of a free market and without well-remembered and suitable indigenous legal traditions or structures to fall back on. Mongolia does, however, have some advantages in making this transition. It has a well-educated population, substantial natural resources and proximity to the large Asian market. Recent times have been hard for Mongolians with rising unemployment, high inflation and many products in short supply, but this has been balanced by the young private sector keen to take advantage of the economic opportunities now offered. The period has been, and will continue to be, one of rapid change.
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