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.
It is difficult to believe, surveying Pakistan’s 52-year history, that when the country was founded in 1947, Islamic activists all over the world looked to it for leadership and inspiration.
Societies governed by man-made laws run the risk of getting into awkward situations. Take the example of Canada where the Supreme Court ruled last month that the provincial government must change within six months the Family Law Act of Ontario relating to spousal benefits.
‘Internationalisation’ has become the new buzzword in the post-Kargil environment in Pakistan. Government spokesmen miss no opportunity to put the most positive spin on the Washington Agreement that prime minister Nawaz Sharif was humiliatingly forced into on July 4.
Arab interior and justice ministers met in Jeddah, in the Hijaz, on August 1 to establish structures for the implementation of the Arab treaty against ‘terrorism’ which came into force on May 7 following its ratification by seven Arab League member states.
Indonesian national police chief General Rusmanhadi announced the beginning of a new six-month offensive against Islamic rebels in Ache Sumatra on August 5.
The welcome that Israel’s new prime minister received in Arab capitals following his election victory was not unprecedented. The praise for the Zionist state’s most decorated general as a ‘trustworthy man of peace’ has its parallel in the late Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s sudden visit to Jerusalem in November 1977.
The student demonstrations in Tehran during the second week of July were widely interpreted, especially in the west, as a major crisis in the Revolution and possibly even the beginning of the end for the Islamic Republic. Western media and government officials welcomed them as the beginning of a popular uprising against the Islamic state.
Russian troops launched military operations on Muslims controlling an area of southern Dagestan on August 8, after claiming that Chechen fighters had crossed the border the previous day and begun fortifying the villages of Anslta and Rakhata in the Botlikh district
Shaikh Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind Egyptian alim and leader of the Gama’a Al-Islamiyya who is being held in solitary confinement in a US jail on spurious terrorism charges, is gravely ill. His already failing health has deteriorated rapidly in the last few months.
Fears of US action against Shaikh Osama bin Laden were further raised on August 9, when US military aircraft carrying commandos were reported to have landed at Islamabad and Quetta airports. Speaking at a rally later the same day, Maulana Fazalur Rahman, head of the pro-Taleban Jami’at Ulama-e Islam (JUI)...
The Muslim campaign against the US government’s Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, by which Muslims can be arrested, imprisoned and deported without ever being charged with any offence, or even informed of the evidence being used against them...
