If you’re doing New Year resolutions, put human rights before losing weight or reducing your credit-card bill. That’s the message of the executive director of the National Secular Society, Keith Porteous Wood.

“[W]e would urge you all to make one about something much more important to future generations,” he says. “To vow to support Human Rights. For it is they which underpin our way of life – for many they represent one of the greatest achievements of Western civilisation.”

Wood’s plea comes in the first NSS Newsline e-zine of the New Year, in which he writes,

The body overseeing Universal Human Rights is the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC). Taking part in their meetings is a sobering experience. While there are countries, groups and individuals who make wonderful contributions, Human Rights are undoubtedly becoming less universal and inalienable. The individual’s rights are in great danger of becoming alienated in favour of group rights – often for religions.

The proceedings of the UNHRC have become a constant battle between Western nations, on the one hand, and the numerous members of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), aided by a few countries who always support them and in turn receive support from them. These include China, Cuba and even India.

So, the 56 OIC countries are also making considerable progress on an international declaration on defamation of religion – a kind of all-religions blasphemy super law. Anyone seeking to draw attention to the capital offence of apostasy will be lucky even to be heard, and there is no chance of any action. Anything deemed the slightest bit critical of Islam is immediately jumped upon, and possibly even excised from the official record.

But the problem, he says, is more serious even than apostacy laws or threats to religious expression: “The whole edifice of Universal Human Rights is crumbling before our very eyes, and the ‘West’ is letting it happen.

“With all the support the OIC can muster, and with painfully little active opposition from the ‘West’, those supporting the Universal declaration no longer have the upper hand.”

You can read his full message at the NSS website.