The United Nations (U.N.) established the standards of basic human rights when it adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. Muslim states, under the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), revisited these concepts on their own in the 1980s to draft the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, which presented a set of rights informed by “Sharia,” or Islamic law. Within the document, the OIC included many of the rights presented in the UDHR, although it neglected gender and non-Muslim rights. Yet, by far, the organization’s greatest fault is that it co-opted the language of Sharia in the Cairo Declaration to empower states at the expense of individuals. After its adoption, most human rights activists in the West and some in the Muslim world claimed that the instrument conflicted with the UDHR.
In the early 2010s, the OIC began revising the Cairo Declaration and introduced the OIC Declaration on Human Rights (ODHR) almost a decade later. While the ODHR still falls short in certain respects, it better reflects the UDHR’s basic standard and offers the international community an opportunity to cooperate with the OIC to better protect human rights in the Muslim world.
Key Recommendations
•Implementation: The OIC should continue to refine its human rights vision, move to implement basic freedoms with binding treaties as well as monitoring, and help member states to build their human rights capacity.
•Diplomacy: The U.N., Western governments, and human rights non-governmental organizations should collaborate with OIC states to implement those rights mentioned in both the ODHR and the UDHR. In areas of divergence, the international community should engage in dialogue and diplomacy with the OIC.
•Civil Society: The OIC should work with civil society in member states to increase efficacy and guarantee that the ODHR has visibility, legitimacy, and impact.
The-Organization-of-Islamic-Cooperations-declaration-on-human-rights-promises-and-pitfalls.pdf