President Barack Obama's two-hour meeting with Saudi king Abdullah touched on US policies on Iran and Syria but not about the Saudis' atrocious human rights record and abuse of women. Obama was also subjected to subtle form of racism, something widespread in the primitive desert kingdom.
Even circumspect Canadian journalists have been forced to speak out against the award given Harper’s record of shutting human rights organizations and riding rough shod over democratic norms. Bob Hepburn of the Toronto Star wrote on the editorial page: “Stephen Harper’s democracy award a sad joke on Canadians.”
The United Nations general assembly has overwhelmingly approved a new Human Rights Council to replace the "widely discredited" Human Rights Commission; 170 of its 191 members voted in favour, four voting against and three abstaining. The vote followed a proposal for reform that was made by Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, who is keen to make his dismal term seem better before he bows out at the end of this year.
The Islamic Human Rights Commission held a one-day conference on ‘Islamic and Western Percentions of Human Rights’ in London on September 12, 2003, in cooperation with the Islamic College for Advanced Studies and other bodies. This is the first part of the presentation to the conference by ARZU MERALI of the IHRC. The remainder will be published in the next issue.
Terrorism is not new to Britain: its past is marked by IRA threats, riots and bombings. Nor does this problem belong to a remote past. Relatively recent attacks, for example the IRA’s failed attempt to kill PM Mrs Thatcher (a bomb at Brighton’s Grand Hotel during the Tory party conference in 1984) and also the 3,000lb IRA bomb-explosion in Manchester on 15 June 1996, which injured more than 200 people, are proof of that.
Americans are furious after the US was expelled from the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) earlier this month.
Liberalism and human rights are two of the major ideological sticks the west uses to beat Islam. They represent, we are constantly told, universal values based on humanity’s collective experiences and mature rationality.
Over fifty years after the United Nations proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the human rights of the vast majority of people in the world are completely unprotected.
On December 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ (UDHR), whose fiftieth anniversary was celebrated with much fanfare last month.
