Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards

On September 25, in an event held at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies [CIHRS ] launched a new three-year academic research project on political Islam and human rights.  The project aims to document and analyze the thought and practices of Islamist political parties and track the interplay between Islamic law and constitutional and legal systems in Arab countries. It further seeks to engage critically with issues of Islam, democracy, and human rights and the universality of human rights through an assessment of political Islams rise to power in the Arab region following the Arab Spring, as well as understand and evaluate the platforms and practices of these parties in light of universal human rights standards.The project will focus on Arab countries that have seen radical political transformations—namely, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen—as well as other states where political Islamist groups play a prominent political role, such as Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, and Algeria, and states where Islamist movements attained power prior to the Arab uprisings, such as Sudan. The project will promote comparative studies with non-Arab Islamic countries, such as Iran, Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Nigeria. In this context, the project seeks to foster international and regional networking between those interested in issues of religious reform in these countries. In the framework of the research program, the CIHRS is cooperating with several researchers and academics at major Arab and international universities, as well as numerous international and regional rights centers and organizations.The project will sponsor several panel and discussion seminars, academic papers, and reports, as well as numerous academic and juridical studies, translations, and reviews of the foreign literature on the topics of human rights culture. It will also examine the relationship between human rights culture and Islamic law and the practices of political Islamist movements. To mark the launch of the project, the CIHRS is organized a roundtable on Thursday 25 September, in which several human rights defenders in Egypt, Syria, and Libya took part.

via CIHRS launches a New Research Project on Political Islam and Human Rights – Press releases – News – StarAfrica.com.

This entry was posted on September 28, 2014 at 19:32 and is filed under CIHRS, human rights, Human Rights Defenders.

Tags: academic research project, Arab region, Arab world, Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, human rights, islamic fundamentalists, Islamism, political islam, political Islam and human rights, research, universality