“The Malaysian government, including the judiciary, has the obligation to protect groups like SIS when they face persecution from within their religious communities for propounding alternative views about their religion,” said the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) in a statement today.
Emerlynne Gil, ICJ senior international legal adviser noted that SIS had been for many years promoting more egalitarian interpretations of Islamic laws to end discrimination against women and achieve equality among Muslims.
She added that states had an obligation to protect people who were prevented from exercising their religious freedom by private actors, such as their own religious communities.
“For women to fully exercise their religious freedom, they must be able to retain or adopt the religion of their choice and they must be able to continue belonging to this religion without being discriminated against within the religion,” she said.
Gil also said ICJ expressed concern over the recent Kuala Lumpur High Court dismissal of an application on Aug 27 by SIS to challenge a fatwa against it by the Selangor Islamic religious authorities five years ago.
SIS sought to quash the 2014 fatwa by the Selangor Islamic Religious Council (Mais) which stated that the rights group subscribed to liberalism and religious pluralism and had deviated from the teachings of Islam.
But Gil noted that the ICJ had previously underscored in a 2019 briefing paper on the challenges to Freedom of Religion or Belief in Malaysia the tensions emerging from jurisdictional disputes between civil courts and shariah courts.
She added that the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, in reviewing the performance of Malaysia in 2018, had also voiced its concern over the existence of a parallel legal system of civil law and multiple versions of shariah law.
These, she said, had not been harmonised in accordance with the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
The CEDAW committee concluded that this “leads to a gap in the protection of women against discrimination, including on the basis of their religion”, she said.
“The ICJ calls on the Malaysian authorities to ensure that custom, tradition, and religion should not be used as a justification to undermine human rights, including women’s human rights.”