Making Religion and Human Rights at the United Nations

Abstract

Among the few things that unite microstates like Andorra and Luxembourg with superpowers like China and India is their legal personality under international law, their complicated relationship with religion and their obligation to report on their human rights record to the United Nations (UN). This book tells the

story of how these states—and virtually every other state in the world—have re- ported on their legal relationship with religion to four UN human rights commit- tees from 1993 to 2013, and how the committees have responded to their report- ing.While the committees under scrutiny are entities created under the rules and

regulations of international law, this book offers an external view of their work, from outside law and the rules of legal interpretation: The selection of research questions, theoretical approaches, methods and data are not primarily guided by

a concern with the legal scope of the recommendations issued by the commit- tees, but with the fundamental ambiguity, at times disconnect, between ap- proaches to religion among legal professionals, policymakers and scholars,

and a conviction that examining the relations between these approaches could generate new and important insights. Despite the strictly non-legal nature of this approach, the book has been

written in order to be relevant to readers from both legal and non-legal back- grounds: how religion is approached, employed and negotiated legally is inextri- cably linked with its application in wider society, as the vocabulary and taxon- omies of dominant social actors inevitably influence the legislative and legal

process—and vice versa. What concepts, doctrines, practices and issues are rec- ognized as “religious” in and around the legal process has wide-ranging effects

for individuals, organizations and society at large. Hence, a non-legal examina- tion of how religion is handled in the legal process concerns legal and non-legal

readerships alike.