The government will crack down on attempts to practice aspects of sharia (Islamic) law in the Netherlands which involve compulsion, pressure and a misuse of power, justice minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin told parliament on Tuesday. The minister said that some differences may be settled in a manner which does not conflict with public order, so long as they were entered into voluntarily. Nonetheless the cabinet’s job, according to Ballin, is to prevent the establishment of a parallel system in which “people take the law into their own hands or maintain their own legal system which operates outside the framework of our own legal system”.