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.

Freedom of religion and belief is something we fight for. The UK, where I come from, takes this right particularly seriously, and perhaps that is why it has become one of the most religiously diverse countries on earth. It is also among the least religious.

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.

In a speech today (14 March 2012) at the plenary of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, IHEU representative Leo Igwe criticised governments for aiding and abetting belief in witchcraft, leading to the torture and killing of innocent women and children in Africa and around the world.

Following a lengthy discussion and debate on the rights of the child at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva today (9 March 2012), IHEU main representative Roy Brown raised two issues that had gone unmentioned during the several hours of debate: the problems faced by African children accused of witchcraft by evangelical Christian preachers, and the failure of the Holy See to honour its obligations to the world’s children under the Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC).

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.

English and French versions of this statement are available here: http://www.iheu.org/iheu-speaks-un-disabled