Muslim Countries Also Pressing Malaysia To Do More For Human Rights, Says Lawyer
(TMI) – Apart from Western nations, Muslim countries also want Malaysia to protect the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, and to do more for freedom of expression and assembly by signing on to more United Nations conventions on human rights, a Malaysian lawyer has revealed.
Bar Council human rights committee member Andrew Khoo (pic, top left) said the message to Malaysia from countries such as Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria is that these conventions do not threaten the position of Islam in Malaysia.
The international calls to Malaysia were revealed in a list of recommendations in the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Malaysia’s human rights record at the United Nations Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland on October 24, said Khoo who attended the review.
He said the recommendations from Muslims countries and several African and Asian nations refuted the claims made by local Muslim groups that the review of Malaysia’s human rights record is a “Western, Christian” agenda.
“Malaysia has signed up to only three of the nine major human rights treaties. Compared to Indonesia, the largest Muslim country, which has signed up to five or six of them.
“So it’s not just Western countries that are making these recommendations. Every recommendation is important… Malaysia cannot take for granted that it is doing well in certain areas and that it can ignore other aspects of human rights,” Khoo told The Malaysian
Insider after a meeting last night with local human rights group PROHAM to discuss the UPR report.
PROHAM is a human rights group made of ex-human rights commissioners such as Tan Sri Simon Sipaun, Prof Datuk Hamdan Adnan and Datuk Dr Denison Jayasooria.
Of late, a group of Malaysian Muslim NGOs have attacked the UPR process as a threat to Malaysian sovereignty and the position of Islam in the Federal Constitution.
The group has claimed that recommendations made by a coalition of local human rights groups to the UPR were a campaign backed by Western powers to undermine Islam in Malaysia.
