By: Aeneas Lavinium
ICLA
Cairo, Capital City of Egypt. The Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam was adopted in 1990.
The following video is from our side event at the recent OSCE meeting in Warsaw. Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff begins by introducing the International Civil Liberties Alliance (ICLA) and then hands over to ICLA Chairman Alain Wagner. Alain highlights the content and implications of the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam and explains why it really has nothing to do with what most people understand by the term ‘human rights’.
He explains how there are now effectively two approaches to human rights that contradict one another running in parallel in the world today. There is the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and there is the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam. Only one actually serves to protect human rights as they are traditionally understood.
The Universal Declaration represents this traditional view and the Cairo Declaration is effectively a tool to subvert it. The Cairo Declaration subordinates human rights to sharia and as such it is actually an anti-human rights document. It might talk about human rights but does nothing meaningful to guarantee them. The Cairo Declaration is not a document to protect human rights; it is a document to facilitate the expansion of sharia.
Unfortunately Western leaders take the OIC seriously and conspire with it to undermine freedom and democracy in the West. They pretend that the OIC actually has a valuable contribution to make in the field of human rights. As a result we are confronted by the farce of brutal OIC member states lecturing the world on human rights.
Alain hands back over to Elisabeth who provides a brief outline of the 2012 Brussels Declaration To Safeguard Individual Liberties and Human Rights and the associated Brussels Process.
The Brussels Process is the antidote to the anti-free speech and anti freedom initiatives that Governments are increasingly resorting to. The trend in the direction of tyranny often comes in the form of attempts to enforce sharia compliance. The Brussels Process is a framework to protect human rights:
The Brussels Process aims to:
- Educate and inform the public to ensure that laws that undermine our freedoms are repeals and laws that enhance it are enacted.
- Demonstrate that sharia compliance is against human rights and should not be embraced when human rights decisions are being made.
- Encourage human rights practitioners to consider rulings such as that made by the European Court of Human Rights in 2003 which said that Sharia is incompatible with democracy.
- Create a framework for individuals and organisations to stand up and protect liberty from the sharia threat.
2012 Brussels Process PDF on OSCE website.
