Exiled POK Leader Shaukat Kashmiri

We call upon the United Nations Human Rights Council to note that many voices of opposition raised against the Pakistani Government’s deliberate policy to keep the people of Kashmir and Gilgit Baltistan subjugated have been silenced permanently.  The brutal killing of Sardar Arif Shahid, Chairman of the All Parties National Alliance and a very prominent Kashmiri political leader, in Rawalpindi on May 13, 2013 by the Pakistani intelligence services is a clear reflection of the reprehensible policy adopted by the Government agencies to remove sane voices of peaceful resistance....

Ibrahim Halawa

Each time you are transferred to a new prison, there is something called “the party”. They show you who’s boss. In most cases it’s beatings, but in one, we were stripped, told to lie down facing the ground with our arms behind our back, and they started to jump on our backs, from one prisoner to the next. It’s normal to be cursed, stripped naked, beaten with a bar, or put in solitary confinement or the “tank” (a pitch-black 3.5m x 5.5m cell). They might also torture another prisoner in front of you. Of course you never forget. Ever....

Nathan Hersh

But capital punishment for Palestinian assailants will not help fight terrorism, nor will it solve any aspect of the conflict. It will not deter future attacks, as the promoters of the legislation had claimed. It is a thoughtless, vengeful reaction to a problem many Israelis increasingly believe is unsolvable. ...

Champa Patel

There are immediate steps Bangladesh can, and must, take to improve the situation. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people in the country now fear they could become the next target for violent groups. These include free thinkers like Niloy Neel, members of Bangladesh's beleaguered LGBTI community, or minority religious groups like the Hindus. ....

Faezeh Hashemi

Some people, even among the clergy, have risen to her defence. “They met in prison, of course they can be friends,” said Fazel Meybodi, a reformist cleric from the Shiite holy city of Qum. Noting that not all Islamic scholars agree that the Bahais are spiritually impure, he added: “These are just two humans meeting. What is the problem?”...

Nobel Peace Laureate Shirin Ebadi, who was one of the lawyers for the seven, stated that there was no evidence to sustain any of the charges against them. Nonetheless, each of them was sentenced to twenty years in prison – the longest sentences of any prisoner of conscience in Iran today...

He pointed to ... Iran’s majority-Shiite regime, where Sunnis, Christians and Baha’is have been persecuted, imprisoned and even sentenced to death on dubious unrelated charges. And in Pakistan more people are on death row or serving life sentences for blasphemy charges than in any other nation in the world....

With the inmate kneeling at his feet, head facing the floor, the soldier grabbed a sharp weapon and started hacking at the base of his skull, severing the spinal cord from the head. Then he ordered another patient to drag the body to the bathroom. The U.N. report says of Hospital 601, “Many patients have been tortured to death in this facility.” The soldier called himself Azrael, after the archangel of death; other survivors recall him murdering patients in similarly horrifying ways.....

Tariq A. Al-Maeena

The Saudi media over the years had not been overwhelmingly kind to the presence of the expatriates in this land, and had often generalized them as money-hungry carpetbaggers or worse yet criminals, an unfair tag maligning countless generations of expatriates who have unflinchingly submitted their body, sweat and blood towards the building of the country....

Denise Hassanzade Ajiri

Iran doesn’t deny it executes juvenile offenders but often disagrees with numbers reported. The authorities also argue they are trying to make changes. In January in a meeting with the UN’s Committee on the Rights of the Child in Geneva, Mahmoud Abbasi, deputy for human rights and international affairs at the justice ministry, said that reforming policies would not work without changing the attitudes “particularly of policy-makers and those directly involved with children”.....

Sardar Shaukat Ali Kashmiri

“Pakistan's province of Punjab has recently passed the Women's Protection Act despite stiff opposition from conservative clerics, religious and feudal leaders. However, we appreciate it as it gives legal protection to women from domestic, psychological and sexual violence. Forced conversion of Christian and Hindu girls, rape, gang-rape, domestic violence, honour killing (Karo Kari), Vani (exchange of women in settling the disputes), and forced/child marriages are some examples of women's rights violations in Pakistan. There is need to do more and abolish all evil practices and discriminations, violence against women and young girls in Pakistan.” Said Shaukat Kashmiri....

Ben Norton

The Saudi monarchy’s fundamentalist form of Sunni Islam opposes the preservation of many ancient religious sites, which it considers to be a form of idolatry. Like ISIS, Saudi Arabia has destroyed millennium-old heritage sites and artifacts; unlike ISIS, the close U.S. ally has replaced these sites with lavish Hilton hotels and gender-segregated shopping malls.

Sevgi Akarcesme

Then, how are people like me still able to speak our minds? All these criminal cases probably unconsciously lead to some degree of self-censorship, but we still defy authoritarianism since we accept the consequences of punishment from the pressures being placed on us....

Rahim Hamid

Is it just Ahwazi political prisoners who must be executed for using their pens, the only weapons they raised in the struggle for the rights of the Ahwazi people? Why is it a crime in the Iranian state to write about the lack of basic rights to a decent existence for the Ahwazi people who live below the poverty line, while their land is teeming with natural resources...

The Iranian regime uses religion as cover for its shameful crimes. Back in the 1980s, Ayatullah Mesbah Yazdiwas, allegedly issued death Fatwas against anyone who disagreed with his evil theological ideology.....

Yusuf Kanli

It is as if should the country reintroduce the death penalty, rapists would be sentenced to death and such sentences would be carried out. Come on, be serious! In this country, people still remember the executions of the 1980 military era. How many of these people demanding the reinstitution of the death penalty remember the name of 17-year-old Erdal Eren who was hanged by a ruthless regime to establish a balance of executed leftists and rightists?....

The objectives of the Charter of Medina provide a suitable framework for national constitutions in countries with Muslim majorities, and the United Nations Charter and related documents, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are in harmony with the Charter of Medina, including consideration for public order......

Hamid Dabashi

"In an outlandish lie, Iran maligns and offends all Saudis by saying that my nation, home of the two holy mosques, brainwashes people to spread extremism," the Saudi foreign minister declared on the same pages of the US newspaper. "We are not the country designated a state sponsor of terrorism; Iran is. We are not the nation under international sanctions for supporting terrorism; Iran is. We are not the nation whose officials are on terrorism lists; Iran is....

The fact that the Court of Appeal decided that only the Syariah court should have sole jurisdiction to hear and determine the validity of the conversion seems to suggest that the civil court also subscribes to the same view. The civil court apparently does not care that the effect of the judgment is as good as closing the door of justice on the non-Muslim litigant. In other words, the court seems to play down the principles of natural justice.

Anne Barnard

Interviews with 20 relatives, in Iraqi Kurdistan, in Istanbul, in five German towns and by phone in Syria, tell a story of a family chewed up by one party to the Syrian conflict after another: the Syrian government, the Islamic State, neighboring countries, the West.

Nicholas Kristof

Saudi Arabia has supported Wahhabi madrasas in poor countries in Africa and Asia, exporting extremism and intolerance. Saudi Arabia also exports instability with its brutal war in Yemen, intended to check what it sees as Iranian influence. Saudi airstrikes have killed thousands, and the blockading of ports has been even more devastating. Some Yemeni children are starving, and 80 percent of Yemenis now need assistance.

Forget Benghazi, What About Libya?

By DAVID TAFURI

Jerusalemites need to be empowered not collectively punished

By Daoud Kuttab

Iran’s corruption and human rights overlooked

By Dr. Majid Rafizadeh

Kunduz did not happen overnight

By Helena Malikyar

Compiled By New Age Islam Edit Bureau

In a late 2014 issue of its English-speaking magazine, ISIS elaborated a justification for reviving slavery in the present day, and as the New York Times details in a lengthystory in the past month, they have systematically put their slave-holding beliefs in practice. In painful detail, the Times documents the horrors of ISIS' practice of sexual slavery including the abuse of girls as young as 11. ISIS attempts to justify its horrific acts in the name of scripture. But to what extent is their reading of scripture reasonable?

Literalists, like those behind the Dabiq article, have interpreted these words as meaning “captured in battle”. Its purported female author, Umm Sumayyah, celebrated the revival of Islam’s slave-markets and even proffered the hope that Michelle Obama, the wife of America’s president, might soon be sold there. “I and those with me at home prostrated to Allah in gratitude on the day the first slave-girl entered our home,” she wrote….

Relatives of detainees who die in custody say they have been pressured into conducting hurried funerals, often at night, and sometimes coerced into declining an autopsy, even if the corpse bears signs of ill treatment. In other instances, they say, local mullahs are forbidden from offering prayers for the dead......