Matt Cherry represented the International Humanist and Ethical Union at the Fourth Annual Global Sikh Civil and Human Rights Conference at the United Nations Church Center on April 24. The conference brought together more than a hundred Sikh leaders and human rights activists from across the globe.

I’m a Pakistani by birth, a Canadian by choice and Islam is my spiritual journey. I use the term spiritual intentionally, because it’s important to clarify right at the beginning that faith is not politics, and politics is not faith.

Thank you Roy for inviting me to make a presentation at this seminar, and thank you friends for coming.

Islamic radicalism has been defined in a variety of ways: as a synonym for extremism, militancy, terrorism or the ideologies of Wahhabism, Salafism,  Deobandism, Qutubi

On 14 March 2012 at the 19th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, in conjunction with the UK-based National Secular Society (NSS) and India-based news portal New Age Islam, IHEU hosted a panel discussion on Religion, Law, Democracy and Human Rights. The four panellists examined the extent to which the promotion of religious law is undermining democracy, civil law and human rights around the world.

In a joint statement with the Center for Inquiry today (14 March 2012) IHEU representative Raheel Raza, herself a Muslim human rights activist,  spoke of the need for the Islamic states to do more to promote religious tolerance at home if they are really concerned about hostility towards Muslims in the West.

Professor Heiner Bielefeldt, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, who was a guest speaker at the IHEU World Congress in Oslo in August last year, presented his annual report to the UN Human Rights Council on 5 March.  It was a blockbuster, putting many until now controversial aspects of religious freedom squarely into the context of international law.

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) launched another attack at the UN Human Rights Council today (5 March 2012)  on the decision of the Council to hold a panel discussion of discrimination and violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity. They accused the Human Rights Council of attempting to create new human rights law; saying the Council had no right to hold a discussion that was highly controversial and not supported by a majority of the Council members.

According to the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, European policies of multiculturalism have “utterly failed”. Certainly, when intolerance and discrimination are allowed to thrive in the name of multiculturalism, something has gone seriously wrong. According to IHEU representative Roy Brown, speaking in reply to the presentation of a report to the Human Rights Council on contemporary forms of racism, turning a blind eye to the oppression of women in Europe’s minority communities is itself a form of racism.

The 57 Islamic States and their allies have for several years been pushing the Human Rights Council to tighten international law on freedom of expression by introducing “complementary standards” needed, they claim, to combat new abuses of freedom of expression such as “Islamophobia”. Yet in many Islamic States incitement to religious hatred is allowed to go unchallenged.