Side Event to the 49th Session of the UN Human Rights Council Roundtable Discussion

The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community (“AMC”) firmly adheres to Islam. Ahmadi Muslims believe that the founder of their Community, Hadhrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian, India, was a subordinate non-law bearing prophet who claimed to be the same messiah and reformer foretold by Prophet Muhammad and awaited by all Muslims. An estimated 400,000 Ahmadi Muslims currently live in Indonesia

In this report, the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, Ahmed Shaheed, maps diverse experiences of religious or belief minorities during situations of conflict or insecurity. It explores the specific needs and vulnerabilities experienced by minorities in conflict and examines why and how these vulnerabilities arise through contextual analysis.

Abolitionist and Retentionist States, UN experts, and Civil Society Make a Unified Call for Action to Repeal of the Death Penalty for Apostasy and Blasphemy at the first Hybrid UN Human Rights Council side-event in 2022

We would like to draw the attention of the Council and the Subcommittee on the prevention of torture with regard to the human rights situation in Russia, a country requesting from Montenegro the extradition of a Ukrainian citizen.

We are deeply concerned about the situation in Balochistan which has been monitored for years by the Brussels-based NGO Human Rights Without Frontiers.

This submission outlines how Clause 9 is likely to result in an increase in citizenship deprivation orders that are incompatible with the UK’s international and domestic human rights obligations and highlights that it would allow the UK Government to retrospectively legitimise previous unlawful deprivation decisions. It recommends that Clause 9 be removed from the Bill and that the UK Government undertake not to reintroduce it in this or any other Parliamentary session.

It has already depleted the gold, uranium, and other valuable deposits in many parts of Balochistan. Now, the Baloch coast is nearly void of marine life, which has been the backbone of their economy for centuries.

We, the undersigned organizations, with support of more than 7200 organization in the World, urge the Member States of the HRC to pass a strong resolution at the upcoming 49th Session, affirming an international commitment to protect human rights and justice in Sri Lanka, with a particular focus on Tamils victims of Genocide in Sri Lanka.

For many years, Montenegro has expressed its firm intention to become part of the European Union. To become an EU member state, Montenegro will have to implement multiple reforms, fight against corruption, respect human rights and eradicate double standards in the application of legal norms, including in extradition cases.

The challenges from lived experiences came very early to me, the moment I decided to work as an activist for the upliftment of the vulnerable sections of the population. On the one hand, my appointment as a Mayor in Wardak province (which is among the most conservative regions in Afghanistan) was lauded as a significant step in the democratically elected government’s commitment towards women empowerment. At the same time, my mayorship was the beginning of direct confrontation with the country’s conservative forces and the Taliban. In the last two years, I survived three assassination attempts and lost my father and numerous friends, and so many loved ones to the Taliban assassins.

This article states that ‘an act willfully committed by a citizen of Ukraine in the detriment of sovereignty, territorial integrity and inviolability, defense capability, and state, economic or information security of Ukraine: joining the enemy at the time of martial law or armed conflict, espionage, assistance in subversive activities against Ukraine provided to a foreign state, a foreign organization or their representatives, shall be punishable by imprisonment for a term of ten to fifteen years.’

We are deeply concerned about the mass-scale massacres of civilians in war and non-war zones in Ethiopia as recently reported by Human Rights Without Frontiers.

In a written statement submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council (Forty-ninth session 28 February–1 April 2022) which was submitted through Coordination des Associations et des Particuliers pour la Liberté de Conscience, a non-governmental organization in special consultative status in the United Nations Human Rights Council, it was demanded that the gross violation of human rights in Balochistan needs immediate attention and intervention from the international community.

The statement mentions that scholars have recognized that corruption is a violation of human rights. “Thirteen years ago, CAP-LC states, the Maastricht Center for Human Rights in the Netherlands organized an important conference on corruption as a human rights issue, on October 22–23, 2009. The majority position at the Maastricht conference was that there is indeed a provision in international law that makes corruption a violation of human rights. It is article 2, number 1, of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.” The provision mandates that states should remove the obstacles to the full enjoyment of human rights by their citizens, and there is little doubt that corruption is such an obstacle.

Inspire and equip policy makers to address and effectively work to repeal the death penalty for choice or expression of religion or belief.

JS30 expressed concern about the specially vulnerable and dire situation of Ahmadi refugees and asylum seekers regarding poor living conditions, lack of access to legal protection and exposure to arrest, detention and exploitation

Recently, Anatoliy Sharij, a Ukrainian blogger living in EU countries for almost a decade, was accused by the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) on “High Treason” under the controversial Article 111 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (https://bit.ly/3CXMvaR). This article states that ‘an act willfully committed by a citizen of Ukraine in the detriment of sovereignty, territorial integrity and inviolability, defense capability, and state, economic or information security of Ukraine: joining the enemy at the time of martial law or armed conflict, espionage, assistance in subversive activities against Ukraine provided to a foreign state, a foreign organization or their representatives, shall be punishable by imprisonment for a term of ten to fifteen years.’

Hungary: inappropriately using tax legislation and data
protection to harass a well-established minority religion

Since nearly 30 years, and still today in 2021, German citizens are in general life contexts required to
sign declarations that they did not and will not participate in any Scientology related activity before
obtaining some public and private jobs, or before getting a municipal grant to get an eBike and so
contribute to the city’s efforts on protecting the environment, as it has been happening with the City of
Munich.

We would like to draw the Council’s attention to arbitrary arrests and enforced disappearances of Baloch political activists, leaders, students, doctors, intellectuals, writers, and human rights defenders. They are being picked up by security forces or their proxy death squads and kept incommunicado for years. As a result of this practice, thousands of Baloch remain missing.  Tortured bodies of thousands have been found.

We are profoundly grateful to UN working group on Enforced and Involuntary disappearances for comprehensively raising the issue of forced abduction of Sindhis through a joint communication in March this year. Despite this, disappearances of Sindhi political and human rights activists by Pakistani secret agencies continue unabated. In the month of August alone more than 10 prominent political workers and human rights activists including Insaf Dayo, Ayoub Kandhro, Suhail Raza Bhatti, Zakir Sahito, Kashif Tagar have been abducted. 

The Tamils have been fighting for over seventy years for self Determination. We are a nation of people living in the merged North and East in the island of Ceylon. We have our right to determine our own destiny.  Successive Sri Lankan Sinhala – Buddhist Governments have continually suppressed Tamils right to self-determination and govern Tamils employing brutal military force to annihilate, which amounts to Genocide.

The human rights violations in Balochistan by Pakistan have many aspects. These include enforced disappearances, kill and dump, illegal detentions, torture of political and human rights activists. Human rights violations also include social, cultural, and economic aspects.

We are a NGO that specializes in the freedom of religious minorities. This statement reports to the UN on the urgent need to evacuate the religious minorities of Afghanistan – namely the Sikhs and Hindus of Afghanistan, who face religious persecution and an immediate threat to their lives, following the takeover by the Taliban. We make this statement jointly with UNITED SIKHS, an international humanitarian and advocacy NGO that has been associated with the Department of Public Office of the United Nations, since 2007, and the Gurdwara Guru Nanak Darbar, London, UK, which serves the largest Afghan Sikh congregation in the world.