Elibiary’s reference to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) goes back to a 2011 resolution the Obama administration approved of. At the time, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton agreed to a U.N. Human Rights Council proposal known as “resolution 16/18”. CNS News reported at the time:
The head of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has acknowledged that a U.N. religious tolerance resolution heavily promoted by the Obama administration has the same aims as the Islamic bloc’s annual “religious defamation” resolutions, which Western democracies have consistently opposed for more than a decade.
The State Department this week hosted three days of talks with foreign governments and international organizations, including the OIC, on implementing “resolution 16/18,” a measure adopted “by consensus” – without a vote – at the U.N. Human Rights Council last March and set to be endorsed by the full U.N. General Assembly within days.
The resolution, formally entitled “combating intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of, and discrimination, incitement to violence and violence against persons based on religion or belief,” has been championed by the administration – and some human rights advocacy groups – as a historic achievement, in that it supposedly seeks a balance between freedom of religion and freedom of expression.
It was hailed as a shift away from earlier “defamation of Islam” (later changed to “defamation of religion”) resolutions introduced by the OIC, and duly voted through each year at both the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly – in recent years, by steadily smaller margins.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday told the closing session of the meeting at the State Department that the adoption of resolution 16/18 had “ended 10 years of divisive debate where people were not listening to each other anymore.”
A problem with resolution 16/8 is how other countries will choose to interpret the resolution’s language. CNS News also interviewed Elizabeth Kendal, an international religious liberty analyst and advocate who said resolution 16/18 was “far from being a breakthrough for free speech … is actually more dangerous than” the religious defamation resolutions.”