Petition for defence of individual rights at the UN Human Rights Council

International Humanist and Ethical Union March 03 2008

The International League Against Racism and Antisemitism has launched a petition calling on democracies to defend the freedom of the individual at the UN, in the face of attacks on the universality of human rights. To sign the petition, send an email to licra@licra.org.

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The following text is an abbreviated translation of the original French text, which appears in full below and can also be found at http://licra.org.

Will the year 2008 will see both the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the destruction of its principles by the United Nations? […]

Alarmed at the dysfunctional Human Rights Commission, the United Nations formed a brand new of Human Rights Council in June 2006, which was supposed to remedy the Commission’s problems. Today, the situation is worse: […] the formal development of new standards will mark, if they are etched in the stone of a new and very special Declaration of Human Rights, the putting to death of universal human rights.

[…] The HRC has become an ideological war machine against its founding principles. Ignored by the mainstream media, day after day, session after session, resolution after resolution, a political rhetoric is forged to legitimize tomorrow’s violence.
A "triple alliance" of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) represented so far by Pakistan, the Non-Aligned Movement where Cuba, Venezuela and Iran have a central role, and China -- with the cynical complacency of Russia – are working together to establish of a genuine revolution in the guise of "multiculturalism". Thus, the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, Doudou Diène has said that criticism of the Burqa is a racist aggression, that secularism is rooted in a culture of slavery and colonialism and that the French law against the wearing of religious symbols in schools is part of anti-Muslim racism, renamed "Western Islamophobia ".

The confusion of minds is at its peak when any criticism of religion is denounced as a racist attitude. This is a radical threat against freedom of thought which is being condoned by the United Nations. By equating with racism any criticism of the excesses of those who speak in the name of Islam, because supposedly such criticism belongs to neo-colonialist attitudes, the spokespersons of this new alliance tighten a little the noose they have put on the neck of their own peoples and undermine the foundations of a civility hard-won in Europe since the wars of religion.

In September 2007, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, participated in a conference in Tehran on "human rights and cultural diversity". Wearing the veil, as the law of the Islamic Republic requires, the High Commissioner was a silent witness to the statement of future principles summarized as follows: "offence against religious values considered to be racist." Much worse, the day after her visit 21 Iranians, including several minors, were hanged in public. It was in her presence that President Ahmadinejad reiterated his call for the destruction of Israel, a member of the United Nations established by it. Asked about her silence, the High Commissioner justified her inaction as respect for Iranian law by which, as a lawyer, she felt bound and in order "not to offend her hosts." […] It was Dr. Gœbbels who used this argument of opportunity, at the League of Nations in 1933, to evade any criticism from a powerless international institution but whose principles at least were not led astray as those of the United Nations are today.

Great political crimes have always needed words to legitimize them. […] From Mein Kampf to Radio Mille Collines, Stalin to Pol Pot, examples abound to confirm the necessity of exterminating the enemies of the people in the name of race, in the name of emancipation of the toiling masses, or in the name of a supposed divine will. Totalitarian ideologies had replaced religions. Their crimes and unfulfilled promises of a "bright future" opened the door wide to the return of God in politics. On Sept. 11, 2001, a few days after the Durban conference, the biggest terrorist crime in history was committed in the name of God.

Confronted by this strategy, democracies, primarily concerned about their balance of trade, tend towards extraordinary passivity. How much weight does the plight of the Tibetan people have against the issue of exports to China? What is the price of freedom for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Dutch MP, threatened with death, after the assassination in 2004 of her friend, filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, accused of having blasphemed Islam in the film Submission? Examples pile up, from Taslima Nasreen to Salman Rushdie, from Robert Redeker to Mohamed Sifaoui, provide proof that fundamentalist Islamism imposes its law by terror. How many Algerians, women in the Maghreb, the Middle East, Turkey, Pakistan have already paid the price with their lives for refusal to submit to religious obscurantism?

If by misfortune, the United Nations should sanction the imposition of such criteria, if blasphemy should be equated with racism, the right to criticism of religion outlawed, religious law become the international norm, it would be a regression with disastrous consequences, and a radical perversion of our entire tradition of struggle against racism, which has developed and can only develop in the most absolute freedom of conscience. The December 2007 [UN] General Assembly has already endorsed texts condemning forms of expression deemed defamatory of Islam. The challenge is clear, and it is global: it is to defend freedom of the individual. Either democracies will take up the challenge, following the example of Canada, which has announced its refusal to participate in the Durban 2 Conference, believing it might be "marked by expressions of intolerance and anti-Semitism", and cease to abstain or vote on resolutions contrary to the universal ideal of 1948, or religious obscurantism and its attendant political crimes will prevail under the auspices of the United Nations. And when words of hatred are turned into deeds, no one can say “we did not know.”

To sign this petition, please send an email to licra@licra.org