I re-read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights this morning, to confirm that it’s as secular as I remembered. It is. This is crucial.

If you look at the preamble of the UDHR, you will see that there is no mention of any religion. All religions and cultures are assumed to be equal…But in the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (hereafter called the Cairo Declaration), we can detect a completely different tone. Right from the first paragraph of the preamble, the Cairo Declaration confidently asserts the superiority of Islam by referring to the Islamic Ummah as the “best nation”…This is no implication, unlike in the UDHR, that all cultures and religions are equal. Indeed the rest of

Let’s take another, closer look at the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, focusing on certain aspects of it. This is not a selective excerpt, this is one that pulls out certain words and ideas, so it’s not fair in the sense of quoting a fair sample in context. Be sure to look at the Declaration itself – there is plenty of sensible stuff in it. But it’s startling and interesting what a large amount of non-sensible stuff there is in it – what a lot of Allah there is and what an enormous amount of Shari’ah there is.

Keenly aware of the place of mankind in Islam as vicegerent of Allah…Recognizing the importance of issuing a Document

This is immensely depressing.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression will now be required to report on the “abuse” of this most cherished freedom by anyone who, for example, dares speak out against Sharia laws that require women to be stoned to death for adultery or young men to be hanged for being gay, or against the marriage of girls as young as nine, as in Iran.

Good, isn’t it? The Rapporteur was supposed to report on violations of freedom of expression, now she will be required to report on the use of it.

There can no longer be any pretence that the Human Rights Council can defend human rights. The moral leadership of the UN system has