A Matter of Religous Freedom

Nina Shea of the Center for Religious Freedom, in National Review Online, (via Michelle Malkin) on the implications of the Abdul Rahman case for Sharia law trumping basic human rights:

The State Department, however, didn’t seem to notice the significance of the case — either with respect to what it said about the character of the Afghan government or its impact on domestic politics. At a press conference on Tuesday, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns was asked about the U.S. response to the case. He answered something garbled about process, about needing to “respect the sovereignty of Afghan authorities,” hoping for a “transparent” trial, and, under follow-up questioning, seemed to be making a distinction between Afghan values and the “American point of view” in favor of religious freedom. His annoyance with the persistent line of questioning was his only betrayal of emotion in discussing the case. If Mr. Rahman met up with the sword of sharia, well, it was regrettable, but the democratization project was proceeding apace if the trial was transparent, and the rule of law followed. Whether “self-evident” freedoms were guaranteed or not was simply not a concern.

Burns’s response was very familiar to those of us who had been pressing for an unambiguous assertion of individual freedoms and rights over the past three years during the drafting of Afghanistan’s and Iraq’s constitution. It was this same exclusive focus on process over values — the same impatient shrug of the shoulders-that was given by key officials in the administration whenever the drafts were criticized for containing provisions that ushered in sharia or otherwise negated or clouded individual rights. (For example, the so-called “repugnancy clause,” found in both the Afghanistan and Iraq constitutions, which asserts that no law can contradict Islam.) At that time, our criticism found no echo. In fact, it was drowned out with near universal acclaim from law professors involved in the drafting and from the media. The New York Times editorial page on January 6, 2004, called the new Afghanistan constitution “one of the most enlightened constitutions in the Islamic world” and applauded it on the basis that it “balances the goal of an Islamic state with the promise to abide by the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

President Bush has expressed his concern and Secretary of State Rice is in direct contact with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Given the difficulty of getting agreement on a new constitution in a fledgling democracy that we helped establish, perhaps it was too much to accomplish right off the bat. Perhaps a case like this and the outrage of world opinion is the only way individual freedom of religion will be achieved anytime soon in countries like Afghanistan. So we had best make the most of it, and it was a very good thing that today in Washington Americans rallied to support the human rights of Abdul Rahman. Mary Katharine Ham here.