When the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay visited the Maldives, she wasn’t expecting to make much of a splash there. Officially the Republic of Maldives is a Constitutional democracy with open elections that any Muslim can vote in (not being a Muslim happens to be against the law in the Maldives). Unofficially it’s a paranoid theocracy based on Sharia law where an Indian teacher who drew a compass had to be hurriedly evacuated after students mistook it for a cross.
The United Nations Human Rights apparatus generally tries to avoid looking too closely at human rights in Muslim countries because it knows exactly what it will find. The Maldives is a case in point. So when Navi Pillay stopped by the Maldives she followed the formula to the letter, praising the human rights progress in the Maldives and after a few minutes of that, briefly suggested that perhaps they should stop flogging women accused of premarital sex.
Naturally Pillay did not put it as harshly as I just did. In her words, “The fact that people, especially women, are still flogged in the Maldives is a serious blot on the country’s otherwise increasingly positive and progressive image overseas.” But how progressive can a country be when it outlaws the practice of any religion besides Islam and holds blasphemy trials and where a judge ruled that four men who gang raped a 14 year old would not be imprisoned because the girl had reached the age of puberty?
Despite Pillay’s careful wording, Muslims in the Maldives reacted by holding a protest that accused her of being a “racist Zionist” out to undermine Islam. This was an unfortunate setback for Pillay who had spent a good deal of time condemning Israel, only to be accused of being a “racist Zionist” for suggesting that flogging women might be undermining the progressive image of a country where a cross shaped design on a water bottle is a major scandal. Read the rest on:
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