Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and the race-religion intersection in international law

Blog post by Juliette Galonnier, Sciences Po Center for International Studies, France
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In July 2023, the alarming rise of public burnings of the Qur’an that occurred in several European countries, notably Sweden and Denmark, led the Human Rights Council of the United Nations to adopt a resolution on ‘countering religious hatred’. In hundreds of incidents, far-right or anti-Islam activists and politicians, sometimes under heavy police protection, had burned copies of the Holy Book in front of mosques or embassies of Muslim-majority countries.
 
These events garnered considerable international attention and received a number of responses (the Danish parliament subsequently adopted, in December 2023, a law that prohibits the ‘inappropriate treatment of writings with significant religious importance for a recognized religious community’). At the Human Rights Council, while incidents of Qur’an burning were unanimously condemned as despicable and wrong, there was no consensus as to how to characterize these events.

The discussions have been emblematic of the dilemmas faced by international arenas in dealing with religious hatred. Specifically, members disagreed as to whether Qu’ran burning amounted to racism, which should be eliminated, or to critiquing religion, which should be protected by law (while encouraging self-discipline in the exercise of freedom of expression). Was the ‘Qu’ran crisis’, as it has been called, a ‘racism crisis’ or a ‘freedom of speech crisis’?

Such ambivalence was reflected in the results of the vote regarding the resolution, which was not unanimous: 28 were in favor (mostly non-Western countries), 12 against (mostly Western countries, including France, the United States, the United Kingdom), 7 abstained. In the debates that preceded the vote, it became clear that some saw the deliberate and premeditated desecration of the Qur’an as ‘incitement to religious hatred’ that involved ‘a confusion of ethnic and religious discrimination’. They argued that such symbolic acts of burning were a ‘contemporary form of racism’, a ‘rampant scourge’ that was ‘sheltered under the banner of freedom of expression’.
 
Yet, others argued that ‘human rights protected individuals, not religions’ and that it was ‘not up to the United Nations to determine what was holy or not:’ worries were expressed about the risks of censorship that laws banning religious defamation or blasphemy might end up producing, ultimately making the fight against religious intolerance more difficult globally. These debates on the perimeter of racism – and religion’s role within it – are not new.
 
In my Identities article, ‘From disconnection to intersection: making race and religion at the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD)’, I trace the protracted and convoluted history of how religious intolerance has been handled by the CERD, a UN treaty body in charge of monitoring the implementation of the International convention against racial discrimination (ICERD). It is particularly intriguing to delve into the history of the ICERD, which was adopted in 1965, in light of current debates.

The urge to draft the ICERD followed a worldwide series of anti-Semitic incidents in 1959-1960, that involved the desecration of Jewish places of residence or worship with Nazi symbols and graffiti. Known as the ‘Swastika epidemics’, these events – which are not totally unlike the Qur’an burnings spate we have witnessed recently – pushed the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities to act to tackle ‘manifestations of anti-Semitism and other forms of racial prejudice and religious intolerance’.
 
Owing to the complex nature of anti-Semitism, the initial discussions on the draft for the Convention involved a joint condemnation of racial discrimination and religious intolerance. Subsequent debates at the UN General Assembly, however, led to separate the two items, racial discrimination being deemed particularly urgent and easy to deal with, while issues of religious intolerance were considered too complicated and bearing the risk of delaying the whole process. Race and religion were constructed as opposites, and eventually disconnected: the CERD was to focus on race only, not religion. This history is well known.
 
My article specifically documents how the CERD inherited such disconnection of race and religion: after many hesitations and dilemmas that bear resonance with the ones encountered by the Human Rights Council in 2023, the CERD progressively elaborated a pragmatic doctrine for dealing with composite forms of discrimination that interweave both racial and religious hostility, such as anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. In this endeavour, the CERD benefited from the wider ‘turn to intersectionality’ that has occurred in the UN system since the 2010s: the intersectional framework has enabled it to strategically enlarge the scope of its mandate and effectively cover forms of multiple or aggravated discrimination where religious intolerance happens to be intertwined with race.
 
By recognizing that race and religion frequently overlap, that religion can serve as a collective marker for racial or ethnic identity, or that religion can be used in certain instances as coded language for race, the CERD has managed in practice, albeit not without doubts, to take into account issues of religious hatred while avoiding the thorny issue of religious blasphemy.

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Image credit: ​Jean-Marc Ferré, UN Geneva, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. 

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Read the Identities article:
Galonnier, Juliette. (2024). From disconnection to intersection: making race and religion at the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2024.2324606

Read further in Identities:
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The veil as an object of right-wing populist politics: a comparative perspective of Turkey, Sweden, and France   OPEN ACCESS

Bio-logics of Jewishness: media constructions of the nuances of race and ethnicity

‘Racism’, intersectionality and migration studies: framing some theoretical reflections