Middle East: Muslim countries want own rights commision

CAIRO (AlArabiya.net)

A bloc of Islamic states accused of undermining human rights standards set by the United Nations have taken matters into their own hands and set out to establish their own independent human rights commission Sunday.

The Organization of Islamic Conference, a 57-nation bloc of Muslim nations and the largest organization after the U.N., met yesterday at its headquarters in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia to establish an independent OIC human rights commission.

Eklemeddin İhsanoğlu, the OIC Secretary-General, stressed in a statement Monday that "human rights and man’s dignity are an integral part of Islam and core components of Islamic culture and heritage.”

Refining Cairo hr declaration

Member states also discussed "refining" the OIC’s 1990 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI), which gave an overview of the Islamic perspective on human rights and stated that all human rights are subject to sharia, or Islamic law.

The OIC has over the past decades sponsored the "defamation of religion" resolution at the U.N. General Assembly, the latest of which was a resolution condemning the Danish cartoons of the Prophet.

It will seek assistance from other international bodies such as the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights and the Geneva Institute for Human Rights in setting up the new commission. İhsanoğlu said in his speech that such a commission would drive OIC member states to reform intellectually and politically.

"An OIC human rights commission would promote tolerance, and fundamental freedoms, good governance, the rule of law, accountability, openness, dialogue with other religions and civilizations, the rejection of extremism and fanaticism, and the strengthening of the sense of pride in the Islamic identity," he said.

Sharia vs. human rights

Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have accused Muslim countries including Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt and Tunisia among many others of human rights violations against women and religious minorities despite many states being signatories to international human rights conventions.

Western human rights groups argue that some of the ways Islamic law is applied can lead to discrimination against women, religious minorities and converts to other faiths.

However, Islamic scholars and leaders have continued to refute western claims that sharia is incompatible with international norms of human rights and freedoms, arguing instead that the interpretation and application of Islamic law is what can lead to negative human rights outcomes.

Just as U.S. courts ruled that detainees in the “war on terror” could be held indefinitely without trial or permitted torture in contravention of internationa human rights norms, some sharia-based courts twist Islamic law to sanction cruel punishments.

Compatible with the west

In their defense of Islamic law experts refer to its protection of women’s property rights and the rights of the socially marginalized like orphans or the elderly. Steven A. Cook, an expert on Islamic law and the west, said that interpretations of what Islamic law means are so variable that in some western societies it can be incorporated into non-Islamic political systems easily.

Ihsanoglu in his speech also suggested the compatibility of the Islamic notion of human rights and international norms, saying that refurbishing the Cairo human rights declaration will be "in keeping with the current global human rights discourse," though he did not specify how this would be done.

Several OIC member states follow sharia law, which has been compared to the Western tradition of common law, for personal status and criminal issues. None of the 14 OIC states that are considered "electoral democracies" are Arab.