Professor Bennoune completes U.N. mission to the Maldives, offers initial findings

Professor and U.N. Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights Karima Bennoune has posted her preliminary findings and observations from a recent nine-day U.N. mission to the Maldives.

Bennoune, the first Special Rapporteur to visit the Maldives since 2013, met with prominent current and former members of the government, including the deputy speaker of parliament and former President Mohamed Nasheed. She also met with local authorities during her mission, which spanned a number of islands.

Bennoune’s findings and observations touched on fundamentalism, which she calls “one of the greatest threats to the rich culture of the Maldives,” along with cultural diversity, climate change, education, tourism, the arts and many other aspects of life in the Maldives.

Read Bennoune’s preliminary findings from and observations about her Maldives mission here: https://bit.ly/2ZJRubP. She will present a comprehensive report on her visit to a future session of the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Karima Bennoune is an author, lecturer, teacher, and international law scholar as well as the first Arab  American to be honored with the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Section on Minority Groups of the Association of American Law Schools. In 2014, she was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for her book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight against Muslim Fundamentalism (W.W. Norton & Company). In October 2015, she was appointed U.N. Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights. In 2016, she was recently presented with the 2016 Rights and Leadership Award by IANGEL, the International Action Network for Gender Equity & Law.