Islam versus Europe

Did you know that, in 2003, the European Court of Human Rights declared that sharia was incompatible with the principles of democracy? Me neither.

As I do every year, I will tonight outline some of the main messages which emerge from our case-law over the past year. This year I shall talk about four cases.

The first concerned the dissolution, by the Turkish Constitutional Court, of a political
party, the Welfare Party, on the grounds that it wanted to introduce sharia law and a
theocratic regime. A Grand Chamber of the Court found unanimously that there had been
no violation of Article 11 of the Convention, which protects freedom of association. This
case gave the Court the opportunity to conduct an in-depth analysis of the relationship
between the Convention and democracy, political parties, and religion.

In its judgment, the Court first noted that freedom of thought, of religion, of expression
and of association as guaranteed by the Convention could not deprive the authorities of a
State in which an association, through its activities, jeopardised that State’s institutions, of the right to protect those institutions. It necessarily followed that a political party whose leaders incited to violence or put forward a policy which failed to respect democracy or which was aimed at the destruction of democracy and the flouting of the rights and freedoms recognised in a democracy, could not lay claim to the Convention’s protection against penalties imposed on those grounds. Such penalties could even, where there was a sufficiently established and imminent danger for democracy, take the form of preventive intervention.

Noting that the Welfare Party had pledged to set up a regime based on sharia law, the
Court found that sharia was incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy as
set forth in the Convention. It considered that “sharia, which faithfully reflects the dogmas and divine rules laid down by religion, is stable and invariable. Principles such as pluralism in the political sphere or the constant evolution of public freedoms have no place in it”.

According to the Court, it was difficult to declare one’s respect for democracy and human rights while at the same time supporting a regime based on sharia, which clearly diverged
from Convention values, particularly with regard to its criminal law and criminal
procedure, its rules on the legal status of women and the way it intervened in all spheres of private and public life in accordance with religious precepts.

Source H/T: Escapist

Certainly, this is interesting but they could use the same logic to justify shutting down any anti-Islamic organisation too. And without anti-Islamic organisations to warn about the threat Islam represents to us, the Muslim presence in our countries will continue growing till it reaches a critical mass where no witterings of the ECHR will suffice to stop sharia being implemented.