In the latest City Journal, Ibn Warraq and Michael Weiss take a good look at the UN's Human Rights Council, after their recent "defamation of religion" resolution in March:
The HRC has no legal authority. It passes nonbinding resolutions on what it decides are human rights abuses and can only make recommendations to the General Assembly. Nevertheless, its resolutions enjoy the UN imprimatur, and it can legitimize barbarities simply by ignoring them. If a dictator can claim in the international media that the HRC has passed no resolutions against him, his job of maintaining the status quo and lobbying against intervention in his country’s affairs becomes that much easier.
Delegates to the General Assembly elect states to the HRC by secret ballot. But since regional “groups,” like African states and Asian states, automatically get a set number of seats on the HRC, the upshot is that Islamic countries, together with non-Islamic members of the Non-Aligned Movement, always control about two-thirds of the seats. As Roy Brown of the International Humanist and Ethical Union puts it: “Voting, when it does occur, invariably results in a two-to-one defeat for the Western liberal democracies.” [...]
The HRC’s promotion of what are, in effect, blasphemy taboos is a logical extension of its internal policy. The HRC is run like an oligarchy governed by Orwellian speech codes, with any criticism of the body’s behavior immediately stifled in session. In March 2008 testimony to the HRC, for instance, Roy Brown mentioned that the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam—passed and ratified by the OIC in 1990—took sharia as its legal premise and was inimical to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Brown was challenging a claim made by Masood Khan, Pakistan’s UN ambassador, who had told the council, on behalf of the OIC, that the Cairo Declaration was a “complement” rather than an alternative to the Universal Declaration. Immediately, Imran Ahmed Siddiqui, the HRC delegate from Pakistan, issued a point of order, silencing Brown, and announced: “It is insulting to our faith to discuss sharia here in this forum.” The president of the council at the time, Doru Costea of Romania, ceded the point to Siddiqui. [...]
The OIC’s members are wise to stifle any allusion to its own “human rights” documents in the HRC. If speakers like Brown were allowed to delve into the nitty-gritty of the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam during a council session, they would easily show how it proscribes far more than it permits. Article 22 of the declaration, which defines free speech, stipulates:
(a) 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.
(b) Everyone shall have the right to advocate what is right, and propagate what is good, and warn against what is wrong and evil according to the norms of Islamic Shari’ah.
(c) Information is a vital necessity to society. It may not be exploited or misused in such a way as may violate sanctities and the dignity of Prophets, undermine moral and ethical values or disintegrate, corrupt or harm society or weaken its faith.
(d) It is not permitted to arouse nationalistic or doctrinal hatred or to do anything that may be an incitement to any form of racial discrimination.
A Muslim scholar who critically examines the Koran as a historical text would find little in the Cairo Declaration protecting his free speech and much curtailing it. An agnostic doubting the prophethood or virtue of Mohammed would be similarly at risk.
As for bona fide apostates, the Cairo Declaration gives them no quarter. “Islam is the religion of unspoiled nature,” Article 10 states. “It is prohibited to exercise any form of compulsion on man or to exploit his poverty or ignorance in order to convert him to another religion or to atheism.” In Islam, it is assumed that only compulsion or ignorance could lead a believer to abandon his faith or to convert to another religion, both offenses punishable by death. The Cairo Declaration, then, amounts to a preemptive license for Muslim governments to murder missionaries or advocates of agnosticism or atheism.
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