‘Muslim states should show human rights accountability’

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007%5C04%5C07%5Cstory_7-4-2007_pg7_50
Saturday, April 07, 2007

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: The passage of an OIC-backed resolution last week by the UN’s Human Rights Council “urging a global prohibition on the public defamation of religion” has been criticised because its sponsors have shown little accountability with respect to their own violations of most human rights.

Ali Eteraz, a human rights lawyer, wrote on the popular Huffington Post weblog that the demand “makes no mention of any other religion besides Islam”. European nations, Canada, Japan and South Korea all opposed the move.

He wrote that such a resolution might have been worth supporting had the Muslim member states involved demonstrated even an atom’s worth of what Saudi Arabia considered freedom of religion a capital crime.

Pakistan considers blasphemy a capital offence, where it is selectively enforced on Ahmadis and Christians. Indonesia, too, considers blasphemy a capital offence, and enforces it selectively on religious minorities.

Western liberals generally shy away from calling Muslim states out on their human rights duplicity.

According to Eteraz, other Muslims take the position that they are not in a position to extol human rights norms upon Muslim states given their own violations. “Yet others simply abstain from speaking out against violence and repression in Muslim states because we do not wish to provide the right wing hawks with more justification for creating war. This reluctance is reasonable. However, the reluctance degenerates to silence, which then allows our right wing peers to appropriate and hijack the entire human rights project. Once appropriated, the right wing then determines which ‘solutions’ to apply. Most of their solutions rely on force. Liberals need a way to call out Muslim states on their human rights hypocrisy while simultaneously creating a culture of cooperation and respect.”

Eteraz suggested that Muslims should recognise that political freedom was more important than the political model a country employed. Obsessing over whether a country is a democracy or a monarchy is not as important as whether citizens have basic rights such as life, liberty, freedom of the press and assembly and infrastructure. These rights enable democracy and are not a by-product of democracy. “A state that does not have the infrastructure to provide for its citizens’ material needs, even if it turns democratic, will be quickly subverted,” he said. He called for recognition of the fact that the so-called Muslim states were not necessarily “Islamic”. The majority of the laws in the Muslim world are an amalgam of European civil code, Shariah and Anglo-Saxon common law. As such, fixing religious law is neither sufficient nor necessary. The most important element of human rights reform in the Muslim world is via legislation or regulation, not clerics.