- Human Rights
- April 11, 2010
- 2 minutes read
Egypt rights group accuses UN of “killing freedoms”

The Cairo Center for Human Rights Studies said in a statement last week that the Council of Human Rights of the United Nations, which adopted on March 25 a resolution that “helps those who aim to restrict freedom of expression under the pretext of combating or preventing the defamation of religions” is responsible for “killing freedoms” worldwide.
The statement said that cases of defamation of religion or contempt formed in the Arab world “an essential input to the confiscation of many of the intellectual and creative masterworks, long-threats to the symbols of creativity, such as the late writer Naguib Mahfouz and the artist Marcel Khalife and besiege poets such as Ahmed Abdel Muti Hijazi, Helmi Salem, and others.”
The center added that the initiative “made some bloggers, who are subjected to imprisonment such as Karim Amer, weary and destroyed the freedom of scientific research and innovation in Islamic jurisprudence.”
The rights group said that the new measure allows for the suing of individuals in court and the stigmatization of infidelity, “which paves the way to either their execution, as was the case of Sudanese thinker Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, or letting them be targeted by the poisons of intolerance and religious extremism and campaigns of incitement to murder, as in the cases of Dr. Nasr Abu Zeid or Sayed Al Qimni.”
It should be noted that 47 human rights organizations from around the world – including the Cairo Center for Human Rights Studies – sent a letter to Council members, calling on them to vote against the draft resolution and warned in the letter of the attitude of some countries, which aims to drag down the term “combating defamation of religions” and merge it into an international convention “to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination, which threatens not only to undermine freedom of expression, but also opens the door to discrimination against religious minorities.”
Republished with permission from Bikya Masr