• OIC Secy General urges Govt. to guarantee right of burial of Muslim COVID-19 dead
• Says OIC monitoring situation of Muslim communities in non-member states too
• 57-member bloc is second largest international body after UN

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) yesterday urged swift action from the Government to guarantee and respect the right of burial for Muslims in the country dying of the coronavirus.

Addressing the 46th Session of the UN Human Rights Council virtually, OIC Secretary General Yousef Al Othaimeen of Saudi Arabia raised the issue of forced cremations in Sri Lanka for COVID-19 related deaths, as international pressure continues to build on the policy that UN experts has called discriminatory to the country’s two million Muslims.

The OIC Secretary General said the grouping was keen to monitor the situation of the Muslim community even in non-member countries. “The OIC is concerned with the situation of Muslims in Sri Lanka, as they are being denied the right to bury the bodies of virus victims following Islamic rules while adhering to World Health Organisation guidelines,” Al Athaimeen said.

With 57 member states from four continents, the OIC is the second-largest intergovernmental organisation in the world after the United Nations, with a collective population reaching over 1.8 billion.

The OIC remarks on the forced cremations issue in Sri Lanka came amidst Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s two-day state visit to Sri Lanka. Saudi Arabia currently holds the chair of the powerful bloc and Pakistan is the second largest member state of the OIC. 

The grouping also raised the forced cremations issue late last year, in a letter addressed to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. The grouping has traditionally been friendly to Colombo, and OIC member states have been supportive of Sri Lanka at the UN Human Rights Council in previous years.  

Days before his arrival in Sri Lanka, Prime Minister Khan welcomed an announcement by Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa in Parliament that the Government would permit burials after a year of anguished pleas for a reversal of the cremation policy from the Muslim community, opposition politicians and rights advocates. One day after Prime Minister Khan’s tweet, the Government backtracked on the Prime Minister’s statement. The Pakistani Premier has not referred to the cremations policy during his visit to the island.

But calls are mounting all over the world for Sri Lanka to reverse the policy on forced cremations. On Tuesday (23) a petition was presented in the Canadian House of Commons urging the government of Canada to call on the Sri Lankan Government to “honour the religious and cultural practices of Muslim and Christian communities around burial and end forced cremations.” The petition signed by 1,300 people including Canadians of Sri Lankan descent was submitted by Liberal Party MP for Scarborough Ontario, Salma Zahid.

The Government has remained intractable on the mandatory cremation policy even though its fear of contamination from infected cadavers has never been scientifically corroborated.

Scientists and medical professionals and world-renowned virologists have weighed in on the policy, insisting that the bodies of Covid-19 victims were not biohazards and burial would not contaminate ground water sources. The WHO guidelines are also clear on protocols to bury or cremate those who die from the coronavirus.

But a year into the pandemic, Sri Lanka has the ignominious honour of being the only country in the world where a debate is raging on the issue of how to dispose of the dead. In her report on Sri Lanka to the Human Rights Council meeting this month, High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said: “Sri Lanka’s Muslim community was being increasingly scapegoated, both in the context of COVID-19 and in the wake of the Easter Sunday attacks of April 2019.”

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