On March 29, I scanned all the Indian newspapers to see if the amendment in the UN Human Rights Council to the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression got any mention. It was an idle hope. There was nothing.

The 1st Annual Conference of Gujarat-Mumbai Rationalist Association and the 77th Annual Conference of Rationalist Association of India was held on 24 & 25 November in Palanpur. Babu Gogineni reports on this unique event that turned out to be a vehicle for inspiration and excitement for more than 250 Humanists.

'May God Protect Us All!'

In August 1990, the 56 member states of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) adopted The Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam [1]. In this document all rights are seen as derived from God, and Article 24 states that: “All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari'ah”.

IHEU member organization American Humanist Association reports: The Saudi king yesterday pardoned the "girl from Qatif," a woman whose case stunned and outraged the world. The woman was brutally raped, and her male companion assaulted, by several men who discovered them alone in a car. She was then sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in prison for the "offense" of being alone with a man who was not her husband or relative. Her harsh sentence spurred a debate within Saudi Arabia and throughout the world about the treatment of women and the terrors of fundamentalist Islam.

In 2000 leaders and representatives from 189 countries met in a UN Summit to respond to the problem, “the poor we have always with us”. Thanks to persistent ongoing pressure from Kofi Annan, then Secretary-General, they adopted target goals for the year 2015, the Millennium Development Goals.

IHEU and member organization the National Secular Society have sent a message to the European Intergroup on Gay and Lesbian rights, meeting at the European Parliament in Strasbourg on 14 November 2007. The message calls for human rights and gay communities to recognise the strength of the threat from organised religion and to renew their efforts against it.

In collaboration with the World Population Foundation, IHEU has launched a joint campaign against the horror of child marriage, a practice all-too prevalent in many parts of the world, and likely to affect over 100 million girls within the next ten years.

We are secular Muslims, and secular persons of Muslim societies. We are believers, doubters, and unbelievers, brought together by a great struggle, not between the West and Islam, but between the free and the un-free.

We affirm the inviolable freedom of the individual conscience. We believe in the equality of all human persons.

The Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) has fifty-six member states plus Palestine with ten other entities including the United Nations holding observer status.

Each time the state tries to enforce Islam as a deen it assumes totalistic or totalitarian characteristics. Both the religious establishment and the state should respect the freedom of the individual