Human rights and Egypt's future

Human rights are essential to all peoples, but also institutions, for without protected human rights, social instability reigns, writes Mona Makram-Ebeid

These are extraordinary times with incommensurable feelings of optimism and dread in the air. Still unfolding are struggles for supremacy between forces of democracy and others inwardly looking, whose references are to a past that has long vanished, a fragile global ecosystem and the much vaunted but highly elusive more equitable economic order. Woven into this matrix of power relations are challenges to gender, religious beliefs and class inequities perpetuated by institutions with inherent patriarchal, intolerant and autocratic tendencies. The tensions these struggles create cause fear and uncertainty for many people, but for those who work in human rights, there has never been such a moment of unique opportunity to introduce the future to the present.

Human rights activists, politicians, academics, lawyers, judges, reformers and "movers and shakers" now have an unprecedented opportunity to develop new values, mechanisms and strategies to guide and shape the future. 2011 in our Arab region, was the year of the people, "the power of the powerless", the year of the revolution, and most importantly a revolution anchored in -- and inspired by -- the power of an idea: human rights, and of international human rights law -- freedom, human dignity, social justice; in other words, the internationalisation of human rights and the humanisation of international law, as the revolutionary change agent of the human rights revolution.

Today one of the most prescient demands of all the political forces in Egypt, intellectuals and youth movements is to move to a State of Law, which must be clearly embedded in the constitution. It is this notion of a jurisprudential revolution as a revolutionary change agent from an arbitrary system, to a State of Law that will determine the real success of the 25 January Revolution. The only way to lay the foundation for a civil, democratic, modern and egalitarian state is through the establishment of a genuine national consensus on the principles of constitutionalism that guarantees equality and equal participation for all Egyptians without distinction on grounds such as religion, race, and class or gender.

On the other hand, the standard of humane incorporation requires that non-Muslims in a Muslim majority country be granted equal citizenship with equal opportunities to enjoy their own religious identities, particularly that there is a long and rich history of accommodation and cooperation between Muslims and non-Muslims in Egypt. Moreover, there is sufficient Islamic theological and legal basis for this accommodation and cooperation. The role of the human rights movement must therefore be one of strategic advocacy impelled by the imperative of solidarity, on the one hand, and the interdependent universe we inhabit on the other, and that strategic advocacy must be seen as being empowered by the people and the idea of human rights as tools of the revolution.

One of the most important advocacy functions and indispensable to the promotion and protection of human rights is the investigation, documentation, exposure and denouncing of violations of human rights and violators themselves. In other words, what is involved here is the mobilisation of shame against human rights violations, whether it be governments or individuals; the notion that the "whole world is watching".

Accordingly, this fact-finding function is crucial to the protection of human rights. In many countries, government themselves have become increasingly dependent on the fact-finding of non-governmental human rights organisations and even the intergovernmental machinery, such as the UN Commission on Human Rights or the Human Rights Committee under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, would be virtually incapacitated in the absence of NGO briefs, petitions, documentary evidence, legal analysis and written and oral interventions.

Today, NGOs are increasingly playing a formative role in the initiation, drafting, interpretation and application of international human rights agreements. For example, the work of women's rights groups played an important legislative role in the initiation and enactment of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women as well as highlighting the global pattern of violence against women. But as long as the perception of women's role as reproducers and caretakers is not changed, human rights will never be human.

The educational process towards creating a culture of human rights and respect for the right to be different is especially important during a period of transition to democracy, because the struggle for human rights is not only to curb abuses of power but also to promote the democratic exercise of power.

A corollary to and support system for the development of the rule of law and the process of democratisation is the "constitutionalisation" of rights in a rights charter. A recent charter of rights for a post-revolution constitutional democracy in Egypt was issued by a group of scholars of different political and religious hues (I was privileged to be one of them) who gathered together under the enlightened guidance of the grand imam of Al-Azhar, the highest authority in the Islamic world, Ahmed Al-Tayeb, a graduate of the Sorbonne.

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Human rights and Egypt's future