Should the Arab regional system of human rights protection be euthanized (to better resuscitate it)?

Article By : Nidhal Mekki

Today, there are four regional systems for the protection of human rights in the world: the European system, the inter-American system, the African system and the Arab system. The Arab regional system, which is the most recent one, has significant shortcomings both in terms of its basic instruments and the mechanisms that it sets up. However, prior to the UN system, the Arab regional system only started to take an interest in human rights in the early 1970s. As the Palestinian cause has long been at the forefront in the Arab world, authoritarian regimes in the region have often used it to divert the attention of domestic and international public opinion from the issue of human rights. It was therefore only in 1971 that the Arab Permanent Commission for Human Rights, a permanent organ of the League of Arab States, prepared a draft Arab Charter on Human Rights. However, this text remained in the drafting stage and never entered into force, as the States were not in the least interested in it. Attempts to draft a new Arab regional text continued throughout the 1980s, and in 1990 the Declaration on Human Rights in Islam was adopted by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation which is a regional organization different from the League of Arab States and which includes the states that define themselves as Muslim, although several states are members of the two organizations. The Declaration on Human Rights in Islam is not legally binding. However, it played an important role in later developments. Indeed, some Arab states, feeling somehow bypassed by the regional Islamic level felt the need to adopt a regional Arab text. In that respect, in 1994, the first Arab Charter on Human Rights was adopted. This long-awaited Charter, however, was signed by only one Arab state, Iraq, and has not been ratified by any. It therefore never entered into force. In 2004, it was replaced by a new Arab Charter on Human Rights, which is in force today.