Özet:

Delegations from some Muslim majority states objected to being bound by the Declaration and Programme of Action that emerged from the United Nations World Conference on Human Rights of 1993 in Vienna. This situation raised questions about whether a State Party to human rights treaties had the right to reject certain provisions of such treaties, particularly on religious grounds. The consensus of the three human rights experts cited in this article was that a State Party did not have such rights. However, one of them conceded that a developing country might find it economically infeasible to enforce a given, internationally recognized human right, and another pointed out that national security situations that are genuine emergencies that necessitate the suspension of certain human rights might arise. The objections to being bound by the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action issued by some delegations from Muslim majority states also raised questions about the extent to which the principles outlined in Islamic human rights declarations based on Shari`a Law differed from those outlined in United Nations Human Rights instruments. One of the cited human rights experts concluded that the two sets of principles were incompatible, while another stated that they were sufficiently similar to justify cross-cultural dialogue between advocates of universal human rights standards and formulators of human rights provisions based on Islamic Law. Both the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights of 1981 and the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam of 1990 were found to uphold many of the human rights outlined in United Nations instruments. Many members of Egyptian women’s NGOs working to abolish or modify patriarchal statutes in the Egyptian Personal Status Law approached this task guided by the belief that lay people, as well as Muslim jurists and clerics, had the right to interpret Shari`a Law, and that the Shari`a, if interpreted according to its spirit and purpose, would uphold the reforms that the women’s NGOs were formulating. Keywords: Shari`a, Fiqh, Islamic Law, human rights agreements, women’s rights, CEDAW, NGOs, Personal Status Law.

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