A Closer Look at the World Conference Against Racism -- and Why the U.S. Boycott Is Counterproductive

This week in Geneva, the United Nations is holding what it calls the Durban Review Conference (a.k.a. "Durban II") to "evaluate progress towards the goals set by the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa, in 2001." Part of the agenda at Durban II will be the recently passed resolution entitled "Combating Defamation of Religions." The resolution, among other things, "[s]tresses the need to effectively combat defamation of all religions and incitement to religious hatred, against Islam and Muslims in particular." In practical terms, it calls upon Western countries to pass laws prohibiting 'insults' to Islam (and other religions, theoretically) as part of a larger struggle against racism. But hardly anyone in the West seems to think this is a good idea. The opposition to the resolution is making some strange bedfellows, uniting opposition from Christian activists to secular humanists, from Lou Dobbs to the Obama administration.

Every year or so, a resolution Combating Defamation of Religion is floated by a member of the OIC; the first incarnation was Pakistan's "Defamation of Islam" draft resolution in 1999, which passed through the Commission of Human Rights. Since 2005, the resolution has been passed by the general assembly three times, and each time, the language becomes a little more inclusive. But the goal remains the same: to pressure Western governments to pass the kind of blasphemy laws which would outlaw insults to Islam typified by the Danish Muhammad cartoons or the Islamophobia of the right-wing media. In this sense, it's not surprising that free-speech advocates are against this alongside reactionary elements who claim that this resolution is the beginning of a Muslim conspiracy to impose sharia law in the United States.

The latest draft resolution, which is non-binding (not that the more hysterical Westerners care), is the culmination of a two-decade campaign by a group of majority-Muslim governments called the Organization of the Islamic Conference, founded in 1969 in Morocco. The OIC is a permanent observer at the UN and has a parallel structure to the UN itself; the OIC has a secretary general and forms committees and programs to foster ties and development among its memeber states. But the most striking parallel to the UN is that the OIC has issued its own universal declaration of human rights -- the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI), intended as a response to the UN's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). As one might expect, Cairo outlines a different spin on which human rights are actually universal from those liberal internationalists who founded the United Nations.

Right off the bat, the differences between the two human rights declarations become clear. THE UNDHR's first article says, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." The CDHRI's first article says, "All human beings form one family whose members are united by their subordination to Allah and descent from Adam. All men are equal in terms of basic human dignity and basic obligations and responsibilities, without any discrimination on the basis of race, colour, language, belief, sex, religion, political affiliation, social status or other considerations. The true religion is the guarantee for enhancing such dignity along the path to human integrity." It goes on to say, "All human beings are Allah's subjects … no one has superiority over another except on the basis of piety and good deeds."

There is a direct line between the CDHRI and the resolutions Combating Religious Defamation (CDoR). After the OIC and the UN's Commission on Human Rights organized a seminar entitled "Enriching the Universality of Human Rights: Islamic Perspectives on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights" in 1998, the first CDoR was passed in the Commission without a vote. (This first resolution also celebrates, with tragic irony, "the year 2001 as the United Nations Year of Dialogue among Civilizations.")