Legal studies Political studies Security studies

Human and Minority Rights: Spaces of Politicization in International Agendas

SAKHRI Mohamed 2021-05-13

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Human and Minority Rights: Spaces of Politicization in International Agendas

Journal of Politics and Economics, Article 8, Volume 6, Issue (5) January 2020, Winter 2020, page 159-183
The author is Mr. Abu Farha, a teacher of political science at the Faculty of Politics and Economics, and director of the Center for Strategic Studies at Beni Suef University.

Summary:

The study sheds light on the rights of minorities, which are one of the most prominent human rights, which include the right of a person to believe, thought, opinion, etc. Those organizations, therefore, that study was divided into four axes, the first of which is to shed light on the theoretical rooting of this file by monitoring the statistics related to those minorities, specifically Muslim ones, and then moving to the second axis in order to address the area that this file receives from the interest of the international community, especially international and regional organizations. This is through monitoring its position in the reports issued by those bodies. This is what will be specifically addressed by the third axis, which will deal with reports, indicators, and even international statistics that have dealt with this file. Perhaps the most prominent of which is the World Factbook issued by the Intelligence Agency.And then the report issued by the United Nations entitled “This is our home” to include stateless minorities, the search for citizenship, and finally through the fourth axis to include recommendations, results, and solutions proposed through those reports, perhaps the most prominent of which is relying on the Western vision in dealing with this The file is based on methodologies that are closer to reality than to imagination and exaggeration.

The file of minorities in general, and Muslim minorities in particular, is still the subject of academic and theoretical controversy, as well as ignorance and practical impotence revealed by any research attempt to monitor international human rights institutions and their position on the issues of Muslim minorities, despite what these institutions and reports adopt of a considered methodology based on the international framework concerned with the protection of minority rights It is based on an integrated strategy to monitor their conditions that includes political, economic, social and cultural marginalization. However, these reports suffer from several deficiencies that lead to their inability to provide accurate monitoring of the conditions of these Muslim minorities. Its efforts in this regard regarding some sporadic interpretations or inaccurate estimates, and even those estimates, some of which have passed by more than a decade, and since the accurate monitoring of the reality is the first step in the solution, the absence of these statistical surveys prevents the provision of an accurate treatment of their situation, and the shortcomings are also the areas of politics. BroadIn dealing with the file of Muslim minorities between ignoring or underestimating their conditions according to their geographical location and the nature of society’s international view of the country in which these minorities reside, and on the other hand international institutions affiliated with the Islamic world are unable to play a significant role in this improving the situation of this file for several considerations, which will be mentioned later. The most important of them is its weak international role.

an introduction:

Researchers and specialists in political science in general and in the field of international relations in particular have settled on the international legal personality of international organizations for which a number of rights are recognized and that they assume other duties towards other international law personalities, especially states, and despite the enrichment of these international organizations in particular non-governmental International relations, and contributed to its momentum, especially if it played the role of an observer or critic of files that fall within the original jurisdiction of the state as a legal person.

However, the matter was not devoid of large areas of the “politicized” political character of some of these organizations, where some of those organizations were taken as a pressure tool or a watchdog on the practices of the original international legal personality, which is the state. When it comes to the file of minorities in general, and Muslim minorities in particular, because of the wide areas of disparity between them.

The growing importance of the file of Muslim minorities and their place on the agenda of international non-governmental organizations concerned with human rights for two main considerations, the first of which is scientific, which is that their treatment of the file of Muslim minorities is often biased towards the Western perspective, at best, and from a different starting point, and at times they may not embrace it. Approved statistical indicators or concepts framed for dealing with the reports of these organizations with the file of Muslim minorities, and the bias in selectivity and neglect that they may adopt, such as those reports, may be in dealing with the file of Muslim minorities by selecting or omitting a specific case for the aforementioned reasons.

As for the second consideration, it is the practical consideration, which is the weakness of the Arab treatments of those reports in light of the ideology of the Arab mind in a way that drives them to extremism in their reading, so it takes them far to the sky, or the whole dirt falls on it, and then comes the practical importance of this observational survey as an attempt to present an objective reading about International human rights NGOs dealt with the file of Muslim minorities.

Study questions:

The study starts from a major question: “To what extent does international human rights institutions deal with the file of Muslim minorities in a balanced manner compared to their dealing with the file of minorities in general?”

Several sub-questions emerge from this question, as follows:

What are the most important international non-governmental organizations concerned with the file of Muslim minorities?
What is the location of the file of Muslim minorities on the agenda of these organizations?
What are the most important Muslim minorities covered in the monitoring reports of these organizations?
How do these organizations deal with the file of Muslim minorities?

To answer these questions, the study is divided into four main axes, each of which expresses one of the dimensions of the topic under study, as follows:

The first axis: the theoretical consolidation of the minority

International estimates indicate that a third of the 1.2 billion Muslims around the world live in their societies as religious and political minorities (1) . Therefore, the study here is concerned with an accurate description of the file of Muslim minorities in the world, and who cares about them. Al-Maqam provides a brief theoretical framework on the definition of “minority” and its features, to project this framework to the current reality to explore the location of Muslim minorities today.

With a historical reading of the concept, it becomes clear that its content or some dimensions of this content are not new to the Arab and Islamic library, so “Abu Al-Fateh Al-Shahristani” is the most famous of explaining and analyzing this concept by including many of its contemporary indicators and its main features in two solid Arabic formulas, namely, “the bees.” “, Which refer to sects, Shiites, and sects without races, and accordingly, the connotation of the two terms referred to is a religious connotation according to the view of Shahristani, and that is in his most famous book“ Al-Milal wa Al-Nahl ” (2) .

In his famous book, he reviewed all the teams of his time, the historical aspects of each sect and division, and the opinions and beliefs he owes, as well as the non-Islamic denominations of the leaders of religions and laws and the people of passions and bees, and sought to find out their sources, resources and resources, so he spoke about the Jews, the Christians, and the Magus. , And the Mazdakiyya, the Sabeans, and the Hananians, to say in his book: “I wanted to collect that in a brief. All the religious convictions, and the imposters assumed it, is an example for those who sought insight and clairvoyance for those who were considered ” (3) .

As for contemporary experience, it reveals the endeavor of many people to identify the limits of the phenomenon of minorities, as they are, as a convention, a living reality, sometimes for scientific research considerations, and in the other a process that reflects political positions at other times, to raise the phenomenon as a concept of discussions and intellectual debates through the position of the researcher, depending on the position of the researcher To him, to cross the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, politics, history, studies of civilization and genetics, and that on the one hand, and the phenomenon raises as a witnessed reality of internal fighting and genocide, forced displacement at times, and absorption, integration and empowerment in other cases.

Conceptually, researchers distinguished between two major approaches to dealing with the concept in the relevant sciences, the first of which is the anthropological approach, which revolves around the concept of race and ethnic group, as it is concerned with cultural analogies and the history of the main races and ethnicities. Majority in society, intolerance and racial prejudice, types of minorities and collective behavior in groups with overlapping relationships, forms of conflict and ways to solve the problems resulting from it, such as integration and dissolution, pluralism, separatism, and confrontation (4) .

Accordingly, researchers have multiple definitions of the minority concept according to the aforementioned considerations on the one hand, and discrimination criteria such as language, religion, and ethnic affiliation on the second hand, and the numerical standard on the third side, and the standard of political, economic or geographical differentiation on the fourth side, and among the prevalent definitions of the “least” is a set of Or a region, or a country, that differs from the majority in terms of ethnic, linguistic, or religious affiliation, without necessarily implying a distinct political and class position, and therefore this definition does not bother much with the criterion of the political position (5) .

Another group of researchers goes to define it as “those groups of the population that are not required to represent a limited numerical proportion, but rather to have one or another element of difference from the ruling, dominant or dominant group, such as differing from them in language, religion or sect And are subjected to discrimination as a result of this difference, whether this distinction takes a political, social, economic, or cultural dimension, or all are based on it, and accordingly, this definition separates the concept of the minority from its numerical criterion (6) .

While a third group goes to a more complex definition, considering minorities are the ethnic human formations that differ from the main group of the population, whether in religion, language, culture or race, taking into account the presence of apparent weight for any of these variables in the sense of any group as it differs from it. The majority around it, and the translation of this feeling into distinctive political behavior and positions in major societal issues, which is the definition that the researcher tends to as a broader and deeper focus in his focus on the psychological dimension of the group based on its “difference”, which affects its view of the “other” (7) .

From the previous theoretical introduction it becomes necessary to clarify some of the problems of the concept of the minority, which may cause confusion in the minds of some of its users. Not other minorities based on other variables at a second time (8) .

The second area of confusion is the need to distinguish between the minority with its previous contents, with the psychological, cultural, numerical, and political considerations it bears in a group, and between the minority within the framework of political practice, in the sense of a group that practices opposition, and is unable to form a government because it did not obtain the appropriate number of votes, i.e. It does not have the majority, bearing in mind that the minority may intersect with its aforementioned meanings, and the minority within the framework of political practice in some experiences (9) .

The third problem that should be taken into consideration is that the consideration of the number criterion mainly in defining the minority undermines the coherence of the concept in light of the demographic changes in the face of the relative stability in the political, economic or social weight of the group in question, such as the case of the “Maronites” in Lebanon, who are no longer the number of In exchange for other sects while continuing to one degree or another with the same political benefits previously agreed upon (10) .

From the foregoing it becomes clear that the researcher in this study relies on the religious criterion in his definition of the minority, which is the Muslim minority, and accordingly the Muslim minority is “every human group that condemns Islam with its cultural and linguistic distinction regardless of ethnic consideration, and its religious affiliation is clearly justified. The university is different from the surrounding majority in the country, and this feeling is translated into the behavior of distinct political stances towards major societal issues.

By projecting the aforementioned theoretical framework on the contemporary reality, it becomes clear that studying and monitoring minorities is a difficult process, in addition to the theoretical overlay in describing the phenomenon of minorities, but in practice it is witnessing a narrowing of considerations of national sovereignty of the country sponsoring it, or witnessing its distortion by blocking any quantitative statistical monitoring of minorities claiming that some minorities This is an introduction to sectarian problems, or is ignored when the matter is sometimes related to Muslim minorities due to considerations of the secularism of the state or facing the growing Islamic manifestations in it, which will become apparent later when trying to monitor the statistics of Muslim minorities in some countries, as it will become clear to provide statistical estimates available for what may be more than A time contract, or the presence of significant percentages of the population who are religiously unknown, or have refrained from disclosing their religious affiliation due to several considerations, including fear of harassment or persecution, as will be shown in Table 1 later.

Accordingly, the reality reveals the difficulty of accurately monitoring the numbers of Muslim minorities, especially in light of the previous considerations on the one hand, and the exaggeration considerations of some Muslim researchers concerned with studying this file for the estimates of the numbers of those minorities on the other hand, not to mention that there are many Muslim minorities that exist. Within the framework of developing or underdeveloped countries that do not conduct statistical surveys to enumerate the population and their characteristics, or do not have the ability to perform such tasks, so that the file of minorities will eventually quarrel with official and informal international and local bodies, belonging to minorities or the majority embracing them in their countries, making the file of minorities one of the largest. Files are biased when monitoring, researching and analyzing (11) .

The second axis: a map of the international interest in Muslim minorities around the world

Many institutions of the international community are not concerned with the issue of minorities exclusively as their sole agenda, but rather as one of the main topics of their agenda, such as institutions concerned with human rights, good governance, or democracy, as each of them deals with the issue of minorities from a narrow perspective related to their activities and activities. Like Amnesty International and others, each of them deals with the issue of minorities in light of their main concern, or on the occasion of their interest in their main agenda, such as some of them are concerned with the political representation of minorities, others are concerned with the economic empowerment of minorities, and others are concerned with the rights of minorities. It deals exclusively with the file of minorities in its various dimensions, and the study will aim to shed light on the most important of them.

The UN institutions come on top of the international organizations concerned with the file of minorities, but as already mentioned as one of the dimensions of another main file, attention to the file of minorities comes on the agenda of the organizations of the United Nations by two main institutions, the first of which is the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights of the United Nations (OHCHR), and the second of them. It is the United Nations Agency for Refugees (UNHCR). The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights issued an important publication on minority rights in 2012 on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Minorities issued on December 18, 1992 AD according to the United Nations General Assembly Resolution No. 47/135, and the aforementioned report came under the title “Advancing and protecting the rights of minorities:A guide for its defenders “to represent a frame of reference in light of the aforementioned 1992 United Nations Declaration of Minorities Rights, and despite the fact that the report is a general reference not intended to highlight a specific minority issue, but rather deals with international and regional frameworks and institutions and mechanisms concerned with the protection of minorities, it is a review. The selective examples that the report reviewed between its pages to determine whether or not any of the specific Muslim minorities was exposed when reviewing the examples supporting the issue of minority rights.

It is worth noting that the report opened its speech with the development of the rights of minorities in international law by referring to “minority rights” according to the “millet in the Ottoman Empire” system, which allowed “a great deal of cultural and religious autonomy for non-Muslim religious sects, such as the Christians and the Orthodox. And others ” (12) .

It is also noted in the same report that under the item “Other relevant mechanisms” entitled “The Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance”, it was mentioned that the United Nations Human Rights Council requested the submission of specific reports on “all manifestations of Distorting the image of religions, especially the dangerous effects of Islamophobia on the enjoyment of all rights for their followers ”in 2008 and 2009, and on“ the situation of Islamic and Arab peoples around the world ”in 2006. The report also states that the Human Rights Council asked the Special Rapporteur to focus on five Ten cases on discrimination and violence directed against minorities belonging to “the Arab, African, Christian, Jewish, Muslim and other sects” (13) .

However, it is noteworthy to consider when reviewing this report, which exceeds 200 pages, and in the section on reviewing regional mechanisms and efforts concerned with protecting the rights of minorities, the report dealt with African, European and American efforts across regional organizations in those continents, and it did not address in detail the issues of the minority in those continents. Within the framework of these efforts, for example, in its discussion of European frameworks and efforts, the report singled out a significant space for the issue of the Roma minority in Europe, without referring to the Muslim minorities present in the European domain, but on the other hand, we find the clear omission of the report to review frameworks and efforts in the Asian domain and in the Islamic world.

In search of similar international reports that reviewed or concerned with Muslim minorities comes the United Nations report issued by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, issued in 2017 entitled “This is our home: stateless minorities and the search for citizenship.” The importance of the report is that it shed light on some Muslim minorities that are not of significant interest to Arab public opinion, or monitored by Arab stakeholders, including the Indian Muslim “Karana” minority in Madagascar in Africa, and the Albanian minority in the Republic of Macedonia – one of the republics of the former Yugoslav minority – in Europe, The Muslim Pemba in Kenya in the continent of Africa, so this report comes with a significant focus on the Muslim minorities, especially in Africa, who occupied nearly two-thirds of the report, with considerable disregard for the Muslim minorities in Asia (14) .

After reviewing the position of the issue of Muslim minorities at the international level, it is reviewed at the level of regional international institutions concerned with minority issues, including international institutions concerned with the issue of minorities exclusively in Europe only, such as the European Center for Minority Issues (The European Center for Minority Issues is an abbreviation), which is referred to as “The European Center for Minority Issues”. ECMI ”is an international institution established in 1996 by the governments of Danish and German states, as well as the German state of“ Schleswig-Holstein ”. It is an independent international institution located in“ Flensburg ”, an independent city on the border between Germany and Denmark. It is a bilingual and multicultural city, as this city has historically witnessed a successful management of the issue of minorities on the German-Danish border, and the center is concerned exclusively with issues of minorities in the continent of Europe, as it conducts research, studies and documentation on this issue, as well as provides its advisory services on relations betweenThe majority is in Europe, targeting European governments, regional and international governmental organizations, as well as providing services to minorities themselves and cooperating with the international research and academic community.

Objectively speaking, his work focuses on five main activities, namely, justice, good governance, the position of ethnic pluralism and human rights from it, as well as politics and civil society concerned with the issue of minorities, especially the issue of the ability of minorities to participate in the public function and civil society, and third is the issue of conflict management and security in its dyed areas The issue of minority cultural issues, especially language, education, and the ability of minorities to access the media, and finally, the relationship between citizenship and ethnicity, and the associated legal, social and political dimensions. Geographically, the center is concerned with the European regions that are experiencing ethnic tension, such as Georgia and Kosovo, as it provides technical support to civil society institutions and capacity-building for national institutions. The inventory is as follows:(15) .

His project on Bosnia revolves around the issuance of a periodic report on “power sharing” in Bosnia, and an assessment of the efficiency of the existing structures and structures for power-sharing, and the mechanisms for implementing that in Bosnia (16) . As for his project on Kosovo, it is about how to strengthen community institutions that support stability based on pluralism. Kosovo.

Among the international non-governmental institutions that are also exclusively concerned with the file of minorities is the “International Minority Rights Group” (MRG). The United Nations Economic and Social Council, as well as the observer status of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, are organizing campaigns to ensure that disadvantaged minorities and indigenous peoples are able to have their voices heard in more than 60 countries around the world, and it has about 130 international and local partners, providing training services. These campaigns target governments and local communities, and are concerned with the “Batwa” minorities in Central Africa, “Roma” in Europe, Christians in Iraq, and “Dalits” in India and Nepal, to name a few (18)It is worth mentioning in the work and activities of this institution that it issues full reports on the issues and rights of minorities in China, which is a file that was absent from the contents of the aforementioned reports, especially the UN in particular.

Among the most important reports issued by that organization in this regard is a special report called “China: Exclusion of the Minority, Marginalization and Growing Tension,” issued in 2007 in 44 pages, and it is an exclusive report on minorities that are subjected to exclusion and marginalization in the autonomous regions in China, especially Muslim minorities Which includes the “Uyghur” minority, and the report consists of major axes that deal with maps of the presence of persecuted minorities in China, international and local legal frameworks that deal with those minorities, restrictions on political participation for those minorities, the development of other discrimination and inequality challenges towards these minorities. Those minorities, and finally the recommendations, and the study reviews what remains of them the most important Muslim minorities mentioned and silenced in international reports (19) .

The third axis: Muslim minorities in international reports / areas of concern and neglect

The report begins with a review of the Muslim minorities mentioned and silenced in international reports about the Muslim minorities in Asia, as they are the minorities that have been the most subjected to local marginalization and persecution, and ignored or neglected at the international level, despite the ancient history of Muslims in China, which dates back to the first century. When the conquests of “Qutaiba bin Muslim al-Bahli” reached the western borders of China, however, those conquests did not enter the Chinese depth, but was done by trade caravans, especially in western China during what is known as the Silk Road, and it is also dated by his arrival before it through the messengers of the Rightly Guided Caliphs. Year 31 AH during the reign of Othman bin Affan and those who followed him.

With the establishment of the republic in 1911, its founder, “Sun Yat-sen”, declared that the Chinese nation consists of five main elements, including the Muslims, which are the “Chinese / Han element, the Manchu component, the Mongolian component, the Hui / Muslim component, the Tibetan component, and the Muslim component in China.” Of the ten main ethnic minorities, they are: Hui, Uyghurs, Kazaf, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Tatars, Tajiks, Du Teshqiang, Salar, and Pawan, which are Turkish nationalities belonging to Central Asia in the first place. The persecution, soon turned into persecution again (20) .

Accordingly, according to previous estimates, the number of Muslims in China, based on Western estimates, is a little less than 25 million, distributed among the previously mentioned nationalities, and the largest Chinese ethnic minorities who have faith in Islam are the Hui minority, which exceeds ten million people, followed by the Uyghurs, which exceeds a little more than ten There are millions of people, and the rest of the minorities are a few thousand each, while the Arab and Islamic estimates put this number at a barrier of one hundred million people. However, the large discrepancy between the two estimates may indicate that the true estimate of the number of Muslim minorities in China is confined to these two estimates (21) without the index. ) .

From the previous table, it becomes clear that the Muslim minorities in Asia are the largest in terms of population density in those countries, and although some of those minorities live within the framework of good economic and social conditions, such as Sri Lanka, most of them suffer from political marginalization. Such as the Muslim minorities in Burma, China and the Philippines.

The fourth axis: How do international reports address the file of Muslim minorities in terms of relevance, methodology, results and recommendations?

The international report treatments of the file of Muslim minorities revolve in a specific framework, which is based on the Western perspective in dealing with these minorities, as it is based on a clear methodology, which is a legal approach between the international framework for the protection of minorities and the local national frameworks in which these minorities live, then it moves to monitoring the reality of those minorities. Minorities in specific areas, including political marginalization, and standing on the gap between the constitutional framework that organizes these minorities, and their political reality, and then monitoring aspects of their lack of political representation, and in the decision-making process, as well as the restrictions imposed on civil society concerned with some of their issues, Paying attention to the political marginalization of minorities by monitoring the political participation of women belonging to those minorities, to reveal the compounded suffering of them, then moving to monitoring the issue of rights and freedoms for those minorities legally, and in practical experience, and the violations they are exposed to, and some of those reports tend to focus on the causes and consequences ofTowards Muslim minorities.

On the social and economic side, some reports focus on monitoring inequality in the social services that these minorities receive, such as the right to education, inequality in tuition fees between members of these minorities and the majority, as well as the right to obtain health services, and economic indicators for those minorities, and finally they focus Those reports on the cultural dimension related to minority identity, such as monitoring rights related to expression through the use of the language of the minority in the public sphere, the right of minorities to express their rituals, or the right to learn in the minority language in addition to the official language, and the restrictions imposed on religious education for those minorities.

As for the recommendations made by the reports of international institutions concerned with protecting the rights of minorities, especially those dealing with monitoring Muslim minorities, which are the focus of this research paper, it revolves around several main axes, the first of which is the responsibility of the international community towards those minorities, as these reports emphasize the solidarity responsibility of the international community. Urging the countries in which those minorities reside to ratify the international legal charters and frameworks that ensure the protection of minority rights and commitment to them. And the need to provide greater transparency and the right to access information in a way that represents a significant support for protecting the rights of minorities by monitoring the statistical indicators of those minorities, urging those countries to politically integrate these minorities by increasing the manifestations of their political participation, and finally urging those countries toProtecting the cultural identity of those minorities within the framework of the national identity of the state(23) .

Conclusion:

Despite the current scientific and information revolution, and the stability of the nation-state form as a political formula for governing and organizing societies, and its steadfastness in facing attempts to undermine it through several approaches, such as terrorism, international intervention, or civil wars, however, the file of minorities, with the Muslim minorities at their core, remains one of the most important files that represent A burden on the shoulders of the international community and the nation-state together, as the two parties – the international community and the nation-state – exchange roles of impotence and ignorance in dealing with the minority file. Either you find the international community standing incapable of making a difference in the interest of eliminating negative discrimination against Muslim minorities, such as the case of Burma, or You find it ignoring the file as a whole, as is the case of Muslim minorities in Greece and some European countries, while the country’s strategy in which these Muslim minorities reside usually varies between complete political, economic, social and cultural exclusion, such as the case of China, or the relative narrowing of spaces such as China.Like the case of India.

Perhaps one of the most important tools of the state in dealing with the file of minorities is the statistical tool by manipulating the statistics that monitor indicators of those minorities, withholding information about them, or freezing a statistical survey of those minorities, which creates a state of confusion about the delicate conditions of those minorities, and the data about them between exaggeration and distraction It is the climate that creates an appropriate space for the state to maneuver regarding this file domestically and towards the international organizations concerned with it.

In the end, it can be concluded that Muslim minorities in the world are still suffering in the twenty-first century, and that the international efforts undertaken by international organizations concerned with the file of minorities are still failing to make a real contribution to improving the conditions of these minorities due to their falling into the trap of politicization, selectivity, and lack of information. What these minorities are suffering from, and that the efforts stemming from the institutions concerned with this file in the Islamic world will not be able to make progress in light of the same considerations, in addition to the areas of exaggeration in estimating the numbers of these minorities, and the weak international role of such institutions as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and others.

Margins :

Minorities: Muslim Minorities in Non-Muslim Societies, Oxford Islamic Studies Online, Oxford university press, via link; http://www.oxfordislamicstudies .com/article/opr/t125/e1520