Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI)

The Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam was adopted at Cairo on 5 August 1990 by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, then the Organization of the Islamic Conference. It is widely understood as an Islamic response to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by member states as general guidance in the field of human rights. It is not a binding treaty and it creates no court or enforcement mechanism of its own.

Its stated source of authority is different in kind from every other instrument in this bank, and the Declaration says so in its own text. Article 24 states that all the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Sharia. Where the UDHR and its descendants ground rights in universal human dignity independent of any single religious tradition, this Declaration grounds them explicitly in one religious legal system. That is a structurally different foundation, not a regional dialect of the same one.

The consequence runs through the whole document. The Declaration covers a recognisable range of protections, many of them named similarly to their UDHR counterparts, but Article 24 and related provisions make Sharia the outer limit of every right listed. A right that reads like its UDHR equivalent may therefore not function identically once that condition is applied, and reading the list without reading Article 24 would misrepresent the instrument.

The documented criticism sits with the document rather than being omitted. The Declaration has been criticised, including by human rights bodies and scholars, for not guaranteeing freedom of religion in the sense the UDHR does, for permitting corporal punishment, and for permitting discrimination against non-Muslims and against women in specific respects. That criticism is tied directly to Article 24's subordination of every other article to Sharia.

Its defenders' framing is worth stating just as plainly. The Declaration presents itself as offering Muslim-majority states a rights framework rooted in their own legal and moral tradition rather than one presented as a secular universal standard originating elsewhere. That raises a genuine question about whose framework universal rights language actually reflects, and it is the kind of tension an ethics bank should hold rather than resolve by leaving the document out. This is the clearest case in the whole reference archive of two entire frameworks disagreeing about where rights come from, not merely about which rights to list. The complete text is available through Refworld and the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.