Iran wants the world to adapt Sharia as enforceable international law ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, February 02, 2026

Iran wants the world to adapt Sharia as enforceable international law

For decades, Muslim-majority states have learned how to use the language of international law very effectively.

They did not try to overthrow the system. They learned how to work it.

International law was supposed to be procedural and neutral. In practice it has become highly political. Technical legal mechanisms are used to achieve outcomes that would be impossible diplomatically. Israel is treated as a permanent defendant while regimes with far worse records often escape sustained scrutiny.

The International Criminal Court provides one clear example. During negotiations over the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Arab states successfully inserted language that elevated voluntary civilian settlement activity into a specific war crime. That clause had only one real-world target. It converted a territorial dispute into a criminal offense and built a specifically anti-Israel law directly into what is supposed to be an impartial, universal statute.

The same pattern appears at the International Court of Justice. Friendly governments repeatedly request advisory opinions designed to shape doctrine against Israel. Each case helps construct new “international law” precedents while Israel is disproportionately cast as the accused. Meanwhile, mass slaughter in places like Syria or Yemen rarely generates comparable legal creativity. Procedure has become politics carried out in robes.

Muslim states followed a different strategy for human rights law, one meant to inoculate them from scrutiny. When accused of discrimination against women, restrictions on speech, or punishment for apostasy, they argued that Western standards did not reflect their values. Their response was the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, adopted by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in 1990.

The Cairo Declaration subordinates every right to Sharia. Speech, religion, family law, and gender roles all operate within Islamic legal limits. That structure allowed governments to say they were not violating human rights. They were applying a different, culturally authentic model. The declaration functioned as a shield against outside criticism.

For decades, that seemed to be the whole point. Iran is now proposing to turn that shield into a weapon.

A recent Persian-language paper published in Iran's Contemporary Political Studies, argues that what they call the Islamic Declaration of Human Rights should be transformed from a symbolic statement into a binding international instrument.

The authors do not simply want recognition. They want enforceability. They explicitly call for a convention or treaty with monitoring bodies, legal obligations, and coercive mechanisms. In other words, they want something that operates like existing UN human rights treaties or the ICC, where states can be investigated, judged, and penalized.

This is the critical step. They are proposing an alternative legal regime with teeth. and they admit that their target is Israel. But it would also enshrine Islamic violations of human rights allowed under Sharia law.

If that system becomes binding and enforceable at the international level, then Sharia-based governance becomes “human rights compliant” by definition. Arresting apostates, policing dress codes, jailing dissidents, and restricting speech would all fit comfortably inside the new standard. External criticism could be dismissed as illegitimate interference.

At the same time, the same system could be used aggressively. Israel could be accused of violating Islamic human rights norms, committing crimes against the Muslim community, or occupying sacred land. Legal proceedings, sanctions, and diplomatic pressure could be justified under a supposedly universal Islamic framework.

The result would be a structure that protects Islamic regimes at home while creating new legal tools to prosecute Israel abroad.

Only after you read the details do you see who is writing this.

The article comes from the Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, a state-affiliated body. One of the authors, Sakineh Sadat Paad, served as an aide to President Ebrahim Raisi on “social rights and freedoms” and publicly defended the regime’s response to domestic protests. These are insiders connected to the machinery that justifies arrests, beatings, and executions.

This isn't independent scholarship by obscure academics. This is a policy concept backed by the Iranian regime.

The odds of Islamic law becoming formal international law anytime soon are close to zero, but that misses the point. Papers like this normalize the idea. Once a proposal enters academic journals and diplomatic language, it stops sounding radical. Then, in international forums, Western governments often prefer compromise to confrontation in order to avoid accusations of cultural intolerance or Islamophobia. A seemingly harmless sentence gets inserted about respecting local traditions. Later someone clarifies that those traditions include Sharia. Each small concession widens the opening.

This is how norms shift. The change comes incrementally, through language, committees, and resolutions.

The Islamists play the long game. The consequences are serious.

Iran is currently engaged in one of its harshest crackdowns in years. Protesters are imprisoned, women are punished for removing hijabs, and dissent is treated as a crime. Thousands have been detained or worse.

At the same time, regime-linked figures who have defended attacking protesters in the past are arguing that their interpretation of Sharia should become the basis for enforceable international human rights law.

A government that shoots demonstrators in the streets is proposing to police the world’s human rights compliance.

That tells you everything you need to know about how this “upgrade” would work in practice.