AUSTRALIAN courts will increasingly have to grapple with the sexist cultural traditions of minorities from the Middle East and south Asia, the state's most senior judge says, and will find it difficult without more support from politicians.

After 200 years of debate about how to deal with Aboriginal customary law, the Chief Justice, Jim Spigelman, said the country's growing diversity was creating new conflicts about how to deal with the customs of immigrant populations.

Jim Spigelman ... conflict of values. Credit:Sahlan Hayes

''There are important racial, ethnic and religious minorities in Australia who come from nations with sexist traditions which, in some respects, are even more pervasive than those of the West,'' he said last night.

The legal dilemmas include honour crimes, forced marriages and other examples of violence against women, he said, but such cases exposed a rift between support for universal rights and our purported belief in tolerance.