The Organization of Islamic Cooperation and Human Rights (Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights) - Hardcover

Buch 95 von 111: Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights
 
9780812251197: The Organization of Islamic Cooperation and Human Rights (Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812251199 ISBN 13: 9780812251197
Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Established in 1969, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is an intergovernmental organization the purpose of which is the strengthening of solidarity among Muslims. Headquartered in Jeddah, the OIC today consists of fifty seven states from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The OIC's longevity and geographic reach, combined with its self-proclaimed role as the United Nations of the Muslim world, raise certain expectations as to its role in global human rights politics. However, to date, these hopes have been unfulfilled. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation and Human Rights sets out to demonstrate the potential and shortcomings of the OIC and the obstacles on the paths it has navigated.

Historically, the OIC has had a complicated relationship with the international human rights regime. Palestinian self-determination was an important catalyst for the founding of the OIC, but the OIC did not develop a comprehensive human rights approach in its first decades. In fact, human rights issues were rarely, if at all, mentioned at the organization's summits or annual conferences of foreign ministers. Instead, the OIC tended to focus on protecting Islamic holy sites and strengthening economic cooperation among member states. As other international and regional organizations expanded the international human rights system in the 1990s, the OIC began to pay greater attention to human rights, although not always in a manner that aligned with Western conceptions.

This volume provides essential empirical and theoretical insights into OIC practices, contemporary challenges to human rights, intergovernmental organizations, and global Islam. Essays by some of the world's leading scholars examine the OIC's human rights activities at different levels—in the UN, the organization's own institutions, and at the member-state level—and assess different aspects of the OIC's approach, identifying priority areas of involvement and underlying conceptions of human rights.

Contributors: Hirah Azhar, Mashood A. Baderin, Anthony Tirado Chase, Ioana Cismas, Moataz El Fegiery, Turan Kayaoglu, Martin Lestra, Ann Elizabeth Mayer, Mahmood Monshipouri, Marie Juul Petersen, Zeynep Şahin-Mencütek, Heiní Skorini, M. Evren Tok.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Marie Juul Petersen is Senior Researcher at The Danish Institute for Human Rights. She is author of For Humanity Or For The Umma? Aid and Islam in Transnational Muslim NGOs and coauthor (with Dietrich Jung and Sara Cathrine Lei Sparre) of Politics of Modern Muslim Subjectivities: Islam, Youth, and Social Activism in the Middle East. Turan Kayaoglu is Professor of International Studies and Associate Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Washington in Tacoma. He is author of The Organization of Islamic Cooperation: Politics, Problems, and Potential and Legal Imperialism: Sovereignty and Extraterritoriality in Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and China.

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Introduction
Marie Juul Petersen and Turan Kayaoglu

"The United Nations of the Muslim world" is how the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) often refers to itself. The OIC is an intergovernmental organization, established in 1969 with the purpose of strengthening solidarity among Muslims. Headquartered in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the OIC today consists of fifty-seven states from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The OIC's longevity and geographic reach, combined with its self-proclaimed role as the UN of the Muslim world, raise certain expectations as to its role in global human rights politics. However, to date these hopes have been unfulfilled. This volume sets out to demonstrate, by way of various methods of analysis, the potential and the shortcomings of the OIC and the obstacles (sometimes set by OIC members themselves) on the paths this group has navigated.

Historically, the OIC has had a complicated and conflict-ridden relationship with the international human rights regime and with the concept of universal human rights. Palestinian self-determination—a political problem with a strong human rights dimension—was an important catalyst for the founding of the OIC in 1969. Nonetheless, the OIC did not develop a comprehensive human rights approach in its first decades. In fact, human rights issues were rarely, if at all, mentioned at the organization's summits or the annual conferences of foreign ministers. Instead, the OIC tended to focus on protecting Islamic holy sites and increasing economic cooperation among member states.

As other international and regional organizations expanded and strengthened the international human rights system in the 1990s, the OIC began to pay greater attention to human rights, although not always in a way that aligned with Western states' conceptions of human rights. In particular, two initiatives came to shape the organization's human rights agenda and its (reactionary) human rights image in the eyes of the West throughout the 1990s.

First, in 1990, the OIC introduced the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, which presented a set of religiously defined human rights. The OIC often argued that the declaration was complementary, not a substitute or alternative, to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) and true to Islamic principles. At the same time human rights activists and Western states widely denounced the declaration. These detractors argued that subjugating human rights to religious limitations, as promoted in the Cairo Declaration, conflicted with essential principles of the UDHR, including the core principles of equality and nondiscrimination, thus undermining it.

Second, in 1999, the OIC introduced the first of a series of UN resolutions to the Human Rights Commission, asking governments to combat "defamation of religions" by limiting freedom of expression and criminalizing defamatory statements. According to the OIC, this was a much-needed step in the fight against rising Islamophobia in the West. Specifically, the OIC claimed that the defamation of Islam often led to anti-Muslim discrimination. Western states considered the resolutions contrary to freedom of expression and saw such efforts as an attempt to universalize anti-blasphemy laws. Coupled with harsh human rights violations in many OIC member states and the OIC's unwillingness to address these violations either through its own protocols or as a participant in international human rights proceedings, the OIC gained a reputation as a spoiler organization in the international human rights system.

The mid-2000s saw the OIC engaging with international human rights in a slightly more constructive manner. Internally, as part of a larger reform of the OIC, its Ten Year Program of Action (TYPOA) was published in 2005, introducing an explicit focus on universal human rights and highlighting the importance of incorporating human rights concerns into all programs and activities. Notably, the plan also stressed "the responsibility of the international community, including all governments, to ensure respect for all religions and combat their defamation." The new approach was most clearly manifested in the 2011 establishment of an OIC human rights mechanism, the Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission (IPHRC). The IPHRC was charged with supporting member states in their implementation of international human rights obligations.

A number of other initiatives also had the potential to positively influence the OIC's human rights agenda, including the establishment of the OIC Humanitarian Affairs Department, known as ICHAD (2007); mechanisms for cooperation with humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (2012); the Peace, Security and Mediation Unit (2013); and the Women's Development Organization (2013). Externally, the OIC also showed signs of a more constructive approach at the UN. In 2011, the organization cosponsored a UN resolution that linked religious discrimination with combating hate speech. At least on the surface, this resolution signaled a move away from the anti-defamation agenda and, more generally, a willingness to engage positively with mainstream human rights conceptions rather than promoting a parallel system of religiously defined human rights.

Simultaneously, however, the OIC has continued to voice its criticism of certain human rights. Either as an organization or through the voices of its members, the OIC has opposed efforts concerning the rights of LGBTI people as well as certain women's rights, such as reproductive rights. Together with Russia, the OIC has cosponsored a set of resolutions on "traditional values," emphasizing the importance of conservative religious values in the interpretation of human rights. Furthermore, the OIC's internal organizational developments also invite serious questions regarding its commitment to their stated 2005 agenda. The OIC's main vehicle for human rights advancement, the IPHRC, was born with a severely restricted mandate and a minimal budget. Other instruments with the potential to impact the OIC's human rights agenda—such as the Peace, Security and Mediation Unit and the Women's Development Organization—took years to establish. The OIC's weak embrace of the organs that could further its human rights agenda reflects a lack of support by member states, testifying to the fact that state sovereignty and noninterference are still the defining features of the OIC.

These developments reveal the OIC to be an increasingly important actor in the field of international human rights but show that its human rights involvement is inconsistent, contradictory, and at times counterproductive to the promotion, protection, and further development of human rights. This makes it necessary to better understand the OIC, its actions, its motivations, and its organizational framework. In recent years, a number of scholars have begun to study the organization's engagement with human rights issues, including analyses of the Cairo Declaration and the Covenant of the Rights of the Child in Islam (Mayer 2012; Farrar 2014), the defamation of religion agenda and Resolution 16/18 (Rehman and Berry 2012; Petersen and Kayaoglu 2013; Bettiza and Dionigi 2014; Kayaoglu 2014; Langer 2014; Limon et al. 2014; Skorini and Petersen 2017), the IPHRC (Petersen 2012; Kayaoglu 2013), civil society cooperation (Ameli 2011), humanitarianism (Svoboda et al. 2015), counterterrorism (Samuel 2013), the OIC's status in international law (Cismas 2014), and the OIC and LGBTI rights (Chase 2012). Expanding on much of this work and presenting new analyses, this book aims to provide a comprehensive examination of the OIC's human rights approach with a focus on both the factors shaping this approach and the OIC's influence on wider human rights developments.

Human Rights, Intergovernmental Organizations, and...

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Verlag
UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812251199
ISBN 13 
9780812251197
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
344
Herausgeber
Petersen Marie Juul, Kayaoglu Turan
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchpark GmbH
gpsr@buchpark.de

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