At Butterflies and Wheels Austin Dacey and Colin Koproske have an article, excerpted from their longer report (pdf), on the threat posed by the Islamic Human Rights (IHR) movement to the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR):
As this paper is being written, sixty years after the issuance of the world’s first and greatest statement in favor of universal human rights, both the document and the institution put in place to protect its ideals (what has, since 2006, been called the UN Human Rights Council) are threatened more than ever. There is now an alternative human rights system, infused with religious language and layered with exceptions, omissions and caveats. The movement toward “Islamic human rights” (IHR) has been successfully presented to the Human Rights Council (HRC) as merely “complementary” to the UDHR. The meager opposition to this subversion is suppressed, as “religious matters” are increasingly forbidden from discussion in UN chambers. Western powers have either failed to stand up for the UDHR or withdrawn from the human rights discussion altogether. In what follows, we will trace the development of these worrying trends, and look briefly into the leading historical explanations of political Islam’s emergence into the arena of international relations. [...]
What happened between 1948 and 2008? Why are many of the original supporters of the UDHR (such as Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria) now contesting its universality and core principles? One critical factor has been the rise of Islamist thought and politics. The Islamist ideology prevalent in Arab and Muslim societies today is not an intractable relic that has survived through modernity (as many in the West mistakenly believe), but in an important sense it is a reaction to modernity, forged in the fires of political and economic strife and fueled by a painful struggle for identity.
Even a casual inspection of the Cairo Declaration, the IDHR [Islamic Declaration of Human Rights], and other IHR literature shows that in general, IHR schemes “have consistently used distinctive Islamic criteria to cut back on the rights and freedoms guaranteed by international law, as if the latter were excessive” (Mayer 2007, 3). For instance, Article 22 of the Cairo Declaration states “Everyone shall have the right to express his opinion freely in such manner as would not be contrary to the principles of the shari’ah.” This Article permits limitations on freedom of expression that clearly are not permitted by the UDHR, whose Article 19 simply states, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” The Cairo Declaration mentions shari’ah fifteen times, mostly in order to qualify various rights by stipulating that they must be exercised within the limits of shari’ah.
A central tenet of international human rights law is that persons are equal in dignity and rights. By citing shari’ah as the source of law and a constraint on individual freedom and rights, the IHR literature makes a presumption of inequality in rights, for under classical shari’ah, there is no equality in rights for women, non-Muslims, and apostates. The IHR literature does nothing to remove this presumption. As a result, the only plausible way to understand the IHR movement, despite public statements regarding its compatibility with international standards, is that it seeks to use the instrument of Islamic law to curtail the equality in rights accorded to women and non-Muslims by those standards.
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