Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (46 page)

OIC-member states then used this implied ban as a means directly to silence their NGO critics within UN human rights fora.
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Sudan charged in August 1997 that Christian Solidarity International (CSI)—an NGO that had spoken and worked against slavery in that country—had “offended Islam … by implying that [Islam] condoned an ideology of genocide, and by alleging that what CSI termed an ‘Arab-Islamic State’ could order the collective punishment of communities that resisted its programs by consigning them to slavery.” Sudan also worked to get CSI’s status as an official NGO with the UN revoked.

In March 2008, several NGOs questioned the Cairo Declaration’s compatibility with the UDHR in a joint written statement to the council. The joint statement particularly noted references to sharia law and their implications for gender equality, religious freedom—specifically the right to change one’s religion—and freedom of expression, and it criticized the “defamation of religions” resolution.
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At the reference to sharia, both Egypt and Pakistan interrupted, the latter declaring that “[i]t is insulting for our faith to discuss sharia here in this forum.” The council’s president, Romanian Doru-Romulus Costea, accepted this point and asked the NGO to move on.
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In June 2008, David Littman, speaking for several NGOs, attempted to read a statement on the situation of women in Muslim countries and was stopped by the Pakistani delegate, who voiced “strong objections on [sic] any discussion, any direct or indirect discussion, any out-of-context, selective discussion on the sharia law in this Council.” Egypt rejoined, claiming that the council’s discussion of sharia law was inadmissible.

Council president Costea affirmed that “this Council is not prepared to discuss religious matters in depth. Consequently we should not do it.” His promise was put to the test when Littman, in the context of discussing female genital mutilation, stated, “We believe that only a fatwa from Al-Azhar Grand Sheikh Sayyad Tantawi … will change this barbaric, criminal practice.” Egypt immediately responded, protesting, “This is an attempt to link bad traditional practices to Islam,” and “Islam will not be crucified in this Council.” The president once again ruled in Egypt’s favor, seemingly placing out of bounds any discussion, not only of the contents of a fatwa or other religious edict, but also quite possibly of any legal system with a purported
sharia basis.
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Costea explained to reporters that, since discussions about religion would be “very complex, very sensitive, and very intense,” only religious scholars should enter into such questions and that mention of religious causes for rights abuses would be “unhelpful, to say the least, for both the human rights in question and for a true, genuine dialogue among followers of various religions.”

As an Amnesty International spokesman put it, “If Pakistan can come and say that that murder of women for some perverse sense of honor has nothing to do with universally recognized human rights, we’re in trouble.” Even outgoing UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, who had previously expressed some support for the OIC’s campaign, said she feared that a council “which should be … the guardian of freedom of expression” was promulgating “constraints or taboos, or subjects that become taboo for discussion.”
²³

While the Human Rights Council’s president had cast his decision as an evenhanded effort to avoid amateur theologizing, the selectivity of the OIC states’ concern was clear. Despite their distress at the invocation of the name of Sheikh Tantawi, they had been remarkably unperturbed when Doudou Diène chastised evangelical leaders Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Franklin Graham for their “Islamophobic rhetoric.” Meanwhile, Pakistan, for the OIC, had used the council itself to declare in September 2006 that “[t]he recent reference by Pope Benedict XVI to the Prophet Muhammad had hurt the sensibilities of Muslims.”
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Discussions of “hurtful” pronouncements by Islamic leaders, on the other hand, were to remain off-limits.
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Beginning in 1999 in the UN Human Rights Commission, OIC members began a more coordinated campaign of blanket condemnation of any commentary they could construe as a “defamation” of Islam. Resolutions to this effect were then adopted regularly until 2011, when the OIC, sensing defeat, did not introduce the resolution in the council. (At this writing, it can not be foreseen whether the defamation resolutions will be reintroduced in subsequent years and what their prospects for adoption would be.) Meanwhile, the West moved from unsuccessfully seeking compromise resolutions in 1999 and 2000 to opposing such resolutions altogether. The origin of these resolutions was a 1999 statement before the General Assembly made by Jordan’s foreign minister, which protested purported efforts to “establish a linkage between Islam and those extremist and terrorist movements that hurt Islam and Muslims by using religion as a tool.”
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This opened the possibility that, since terrorists and rights violators themselves invoked Islam, criticism of them could be construed as an act of “defamation.”

On the OIC’s behalf, in 1999, Pakistan introduced an antidefamation resolution for the first time, with Islam the only religion mentioned in the text.
²⁷
Its
delegate emphasized that “[t]here was a tendency … in the international media to portray Islam as a religion hostile to human rights, threatening to the Western world and associated with terrorism and violence, whereas, with the Quran, Islam had given the world its first human rights charter.… That defamation campaign was reflected in growing intolerance towards Muslims.”
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In 2000, the commission adopted a new compromise, “Combating defamation of religions,” which focused on discrimination based on religion rather than issues of religious freedom per se.
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India and the EU regretted the resolution’s focus on a single religion and complained that its inclusion on the agenda distracted the commission from “promoting freedom of all religions and beliefs.” Nonetheless, based on an informal “understanding” that the matter would not be raised again in the commission, they allowed its adoption without a vote.
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That understanding was proved false the following year, which motivated the West, for the first time, to actively oppose a “defamation” resolution. In introducing this resolution for the OIC, Pakistan asserted that Islamophobia was an emerging “form of contemporary racism,” while the text itself singled out “defamation,” rather than intolerance or discrimination, and asserted that “defamation of religions is among the causes of social disharmony and leads to violations of the human rights of their adherents.” Though not binding, the resolution called for states “to provide adequate protection against all human rights violations resulting from defamation of religions.”
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In a response that presciently diagnosed problems to come, the Belgian delegate explained that the EU had concerns about the text’s emphasis on “the protection of
religions
rather than the human rights of
individuals
” and its tendency to “stress one religion above all others [emphasis added].” Belgium added that the sponsors had “invoked the General Assembly initiative on the elimination of crimes against women committed in the name of honor” as an instance of a recent increase of defamation of religions and that the “EU does not accept such a connection.” The EU also protested that the draft resolution “seems to indicate that individual dissent from majority opinions and practices should not be tolerated in the interest of social harmony. The concept of defamation can easily be abused by extremists to censor all legitimate, critical debate within religions.… Freedom of expression and freedom of religion are fundamental components in promoting tolerance in societies.”
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Nonetheless, the resolution passed on April 18, 2001, by a vote of twenty-eight to fifteen, with nine abstentions. The commission’s Western members voted in opposition.
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Thus, in the 2001 resolution, the principle of banning “defamation of religions” was established in the UN. In the aftermath of the attacks on the United States on September 11 of that year, the campaign on behalf of these resolutions acquired an additional focus. Already, by November 2001, Abdullah Al-Turki, Secretary-General of the Saudi-based Muslim World League, accused Western media of conducting a campaign of defamation against Islam and demanded that the UN prohibit defamation of religions, especially of Islam. The
resolution the following year passed with virtually the same support as the 2001 resolution.
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The 1999–2002 debates and resolutions show a consistent pattern. OIC-member states introduced draft resolutions citing concerns about what they termed defamation of religion, particularly of Islam. Other states, usually EU members, countered that the resolutions sought to give rights to religions as such, threatened freedoms of speech and of religion, and gave preeminence to one religion. In the first two years, the resolutions, though watered down by compromises, nonetheless passed by consensus, giving OIC states what they wanted. This also consumed valuable commission time and took attention away from the body’s traditional concerns. Meanwhile, the commission’s special reporting on Islamist states, such as Iran and Sudan, was dropped.

The OIC then expanded its strategy by involving the Special Rapporteur on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance. Seizing the new mandate that the OIC had advanced that allowed him to investigate alleged attacks on Islam, Special Rapporteur Doudou Diène, a jurist from Senegal, began issuing reports striking for their absence of evidence and their tendency to conflate all expressions of concern over Islamic extremism with “racist” assaults against Muslims. He published reports covering Islamophobia over the five years following his appointment until he left the post in 2008. Diène warned of “the equation of Islam with violence, terrorism and cultural and social backwardness by intellectual, political and media figures”; of “intellectual legitimization of overt hostility towards Islam and its followers by influential figures in the world of arts, literature and the media; of tolerance of such hostility in many countries”; and of a growing “logic of suspicion with regard to Islam.”
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In general, he asserted that Islamophobia “has become the substitute ideology for a number of Cold War theoreticians.”
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He repeatedly inveighed against Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington for his book
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order
, a book that in fact shared Diène’s concerns but which he mischaracterized, first as depicting “a confrontation between two culturally antagonistic blocks, the West and the Arab-Muslim world,” and later as “an attempt to construct a theoretical and ideological justification for Islamophobia.”
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Despite his alleged disdain for Huntington’s views, Diène himself put forward his own sweeping vision of a brewing “conflict between civilizations,” featuring generalizations that far transcended any of the late Samuel
Huntington’s more cautious formulations.
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Notwithstanding his professed concern over negative stereotypes of Islam, Diène threw about stereotypes and one-sided accounts of European culture, citing the Crusades and the “re-conquest of [Al-Andalus]” in the fifteenth century.
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The Danish cartoon controversy allowed Diène to expand his thesis of an Islamophobia-driven clash of civilizations, with the defense of free expression being characterized as a weapon in the West’s Islamophobic arsenal. He redefined “freedom of religion” to mean the right of a religion to freedom from criticism, astonishingly contending that the defense of free expression is itself an aggressive act.
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He accused “governments, political leaders, intellectual personalities and the media” of having “radically set freedom of expression and freedom of religion against each other.” Diène was apparently blithely unaware that that was exactly what
he
was doing. He did so when he cast religious freedom as a matter of protecting religions from hostile words rather than safeguarding the individual’s freedom of conscience.
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Meanwhile, in those reports with a broader focus, Diène’s treatment of “defamation” against other religions differed starkly from his statements on Islamophobia.
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He depicted anti-Semitism and “Christianophobia” primarily in terms of reactions to Israel and the policies of Western states.
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He was perfunctory in reporting on persecution of Christian minorities in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
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One report, commissioned by the newly constituted Human Rights Council in the wake of the Danish cartoons affair, was exceptional. In 2006, the council sought a joint report from Doudou Diène and Asma Jahangir, who had been, since 2004, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief. Since Jahangir, a woman advocating human rights from Pakistan, had fought courageously for human rights, including religious freedom, the report they produced was, predictably, schizophrenic.

In the first section, Diène once again suggested that inflammatory Western rhetoric was the main obstacle to cultural harmony and that international legal limitations on criticizing Islam were the answer. In the second section, however, Jahangir offered a trenchant analysis of the deleterious effects of attempts to suppress criticism of religious views. Her section of the report provides one of the best contemporary analyses of the dangers involved in the concept of “defamation of religion.” Accepting the legitimacy of bans on speech only in order to prevent direct incitement to violence or discrimination, she rejected the notion of a conflict between freedom of expression and freedom of religion or a new right to be protected from offense. She noted the
oppressive potential inherent in blasphemy laws and emphasized the protection of individual rights.