Category Archives: 2019-12

Decolonizing ecology

On December 16, 2019 Islamic Human Rights Commission organizes an event titled “Decolonizing ecology”. Professor Ramón Grosfoguel, a leading decolonial scholar, and Sandew Hira, the co-director of the Decolonial International Network, will discuss how issues of decoloniality need to be considered in conversations and activism around climate change.

Click here for more information.

The struggle against Blackface in the Netherlands

The annual Sinterklaas Festival in the Netherands has become a testing ground for the status of ethnic minorities and their attempts to influence what it means to be Dutch. The festival is based on a legend that every December, St. Nicholas travels to the Netherlands from Spain with an army of helpers or “Black Petes”, clownish and acrobatic figures dressed in Moorish page suits. to reward or punish children. In recent years people of colour have pushed back against the racist, colonial vestige with encouraging results.

In the journal The Long View Sandew Hira made an analysis of the movement against Blackface in The Netherlands. He goes into the history of the Sinterklaas festival with the character of Black Pete, the social forces behind the anti-Black Pete movement and the question of strategy and tactics of the anti-racist movement.

The Long View is a quarterly magazine published by Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) in London.

Arzu Merali and Faisal Bodi (eds.): The New Colonialism: the American Model of Human Rights

In February 2018 the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) in London held a conference titled: The New Colonialism: The American Model of Human Rights. The nine contributions from scholar-activists looking at how human rights as theory and practice are now published in a book.

As a human rights research, campaign and advocacy organisation NGO working for over 20 years from its base in the UK, IHRC has had to negotiate the dilemma of dealing with not only institutionalised racism in local, national, regional and international organisations and regimes, but a Eurocentric discourse of rights and justice referencing largely the Enlightenment but compounded with the idea that this lingua franca of rights, though deemed universally applicable, is both the sole provenance of the ‘West’ and at the same time is immutable and unquestionable.  The papers presented problematize perceptions of the US as anything other than a violent and rapacious colonial power. Arguably this is the grassroots perception of the US around the world, and even within its own borders there are significant numbers who eschew the self-perception of the country as a leader in freedom and democracy. They speak of the civil rights and indigenous rights movements whose very existence exposes these claims as fictitious.

The book is launched on January 20, 2020 in London. Click here for information about the launch. Click here for order information. ISBN 978-1-909853-04-1