Becket Fund UN Work Featured in Canada's Maclean's MagazineJul 28, 2008 The Becket Fund's work at the United Nations on the issue of "Defamation of Religions" is featured in this week's edition of Maclean's Magazine, a Canadian publication.
Since 1999, the Organisation for the Islamic Conference (OIC) has successfully proposed annual resolutions at the United Nations on the "defamation of religions" - an idea which is fundamentally inconsistent with the principles outlined in the United Nations founding and legal documents.
"Islamophobia is a problem. But [a "defamation of religions" UN resolution] is not a practical solution, and it destabilizes the human rights agenda," said Angela Wu, international law director for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a public-interest law firm based in Washington that is dedicated to protecting the free expression of all religious traditions. And, she further told the congressional briefing, "The defamation of religions protects ideas rather than individuals, and makes the state the arbiter of which ideas are true. It requires the state to sort good and bad ideologies." By doing so, she said, the approach "violates the very foundations of the human rights tradition by protecting ideas rather than the individuals who hold ideas."
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"We don't want a jurisprudence of hurt feelings," said Wu.
The article recounts a panel discussion sponsored by the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on Capitol Hill on July 18. Angela Wu, International Director of the Becket Fund, partipated in the panel along with Sandra Bunn-Livingston of Human Dignity Internation, Ziya Meral of Christian Solidarity Worldwide, David Harris formerly of Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Ezra Levant formely of the Western Standard, and Asma Fatima who is a representative of the Pakistan Embassy .
Click here to read the full article.
Read the Becket Fund issues brief on "Defamation of Religions" here. Resources & Documents
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