every part of the world, and the Middle East accounts for only a relatively small part of the total report summary. Clearly, human rights abuses are a global problem, in no way confined to or particularly associated with the Islamic world. Indeed, even as this chapter is being written, press reports are indicating that nominally Christian Serbians are in the process of committing severe human rights violations verging, perhaps, on genocide against their neighbors of different ethnic or religious background. Indeed, Muslims are among the principal victims of current Serbian abuses.
In the last chapter, we examined the modern development, in theory and practice, of Islamic penology. In this chapter, we will consider more specificlly the "human rights" issues that are raised by the imposition of Islamic criminal law codes and Islamic punishments in Muslim countries.
There are several aspects to the question of human rights. First, what, precisely, do we mean by "human rights?" In strict formality, most international considerations of human rights questions are framed in terms of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as adopted by the United Nations in 1948. This, for example, is the standard which the organization Amnesty International uses as its yardstick in evaluating the human rights performance of various governments around the world.
More informally and impressionistically, what Westerners at least tend to mean by human rights violations is any conduct that outrages their familiar standard of proper governmental or judicial conduct. Torture, whether judicially imposed or carried out informally by security officers, is perhaps the architypal instance of a human rights violation. So is the use of (especially) deadly force in a civil disturbance situation when it goes beyond the minimum needed to quell the disturbance admitting that defining the "necessary" level of force is a highly su...