April 02, 2009

Dean Harold Koh on Sharia

The right wing media has falsely attacked Dean Harold Koh of the Yale Law School as someone who would impose Sharia law on the United States.

Glen Beck claims that Dean Koh would place “Sharia law over our Constitution.” Daniel Pipes titles his blog post denouncing Koh, “Harold Koh, Promoter of Shari'a?”

These right wing pundits seem, as usual, to have little concern for the facts. Dean Koh was Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, Democracy, and Labor in the Clinton Administration—I do not recall that period as being one where the State Department sought to bring Sharia to the U.S.

Others have already addressed the false claim that Dean Koh voiced willingness to look to Sharia law as part of foreign law in a Yale Club of Connecticut talk (he actually, as the New York Times reported, “said that there were ‘common underlying concepts” in many legal systems around the world”).

In the 71 articles penned by Harold Koh that appear in the Westlaw law review database, there is but one article that mentions Sharia (I tried a number of variations in the spelling of that term).  This article is titled “Restoring America’s Human Rights Reputation” and appears in the Cornell International Law Journal after a lecture he delivered at that law school. 

In that article, he denounces the government of Iran for “impos[ing] a strict form of Sharia law that denies basic rights to women and minorities.”  (p. 69) The full passage is even more clear about his aversion to fundamentalist mullahs:

The human rights situation in Iran remains increasingly disturbing. Although a great percentage of the Iranian people support democratic reform, the country remains in the hands of the conservative clerics, who closely monitor and restrict the opposition and the press, punish human rights defenders, and impose a strict form of Sharia law that denies basic rights to women and minorities.

Here, Dean Koh shows the diplomat’s ability to separate the people of the country from their oppressive leaders. Like President Obama, who recently addressed the people of Iran in a Persian New Year greeting, Koh understands that many people in Iran would prefer democratic reform. Furthermore, he is concerned about free speech, denouncing Iran for “shut[ing] down two independent newspapers and block[ing] access to many media internet sites.”

In a footnote, he quotes from the State Department report on Iran:

As the Iran Report notes:
Human rights problems included severe restriction of the right of citizens to change their government peacefully unjust executions after reportedly unfair trials; disappearances; torture and severe officially sanctioned punishments such as death by stoning; flogging; excessive use of force against demonstrators; violence by vigilante groups with ties to the government; poor prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; lack of judicial independence; lack of fair public trials; political prisoners and detainees; severe restrictions on civil liberties including speech, press, assembly, association, movement, and privacy; severe restrictions on freedom of religion; official corruption; violence and legal and societal discrimination against women, ethnic and religious minorities, and homosexuals; incitement to anti-Semitism; severe restriction of workers' rights, including freedom of association and the right to organize and bargain collectively; and child labor.
U.S. Dep't of State, Iran: Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - 2006 intro. (2007), available at http:// www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2006/78852.htm.
 

In the article, he criticizes the human rights abuses in North Korea and elsewhere (including Saudi Arabia), but notes that our own ability to criticize others has been undermined by abuses such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. He seeks to restore our leadership on human rights in the world.

Of course, the right wing will remain unsatisfied by this mention of Sharia. They will complain that his aversion is to “a strict form of Sharia law,” and not a denunciation of all Sharia law itself. Such a denunciation would be remarkably obtuse. It would alienate the people whom we most need to staunch global terrorism. Equally important, it would suggest that no liberal interpretations of Sharia are possible. As Madhavi Sunder has shown in her Yale Law Journal article, Piercing the Veil, this is false. Women around the world are challenging fundamentalist interpretations of the Koran. Like all the great religions, Islam too is open to interpretation, some liberal, others quite oppressive. (For novices like me, Karen Armstrong’s introduction to Islam is also helpful on this front.)

As Dahlia Lithwick writes, if we allow such outrageously false claims to be made about human rights leaders like Harold Koh, when shall we speak?

Posted by Anupam Chander on April 2, 2009 at 09:29 AM | Permalink