The first article of Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) reads:
(All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.)
Discrimination means making differences between people the basis of action, evaluation, decision-making and reaction, whether the differences are apparent such as skin color, or mental, such as religious, political, and other opinions. Obviously, people are different and not everyone is the same, both in appearance and in thinking, but these differences must be organized and managed, not used as an excuse to discriminate and punish a person or group and deprive them of their human and fundamental rights. Discrimination in its most severe manifestations leads to genocide and in other cases to violence based on skin color, age, gender, occupation or social origin.
Discrimination is addressed in several international laws. These include the human rights law, which is mentioned and prohibited in all its declarations and treaties, and it is the duty of the state to eliminate discrimination and to punish those who commit, promote and emphasize on discrimination. According to the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the state may not derogate from providing adequate conditions for the right to religious and political differences in times of disaster. The state must not use disasters as an excuse to discriminate on the basis of religious beliefs. Similarly, in humanitarian law and criminal law, including the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Article 8, paragraph 2, which deals with the crime of torture), another meaning of discrimination is found: No distinction between people or civilian objectives and military objectives in times of war.
In its 2001 draft Articles on the Responsibility of States, the International Law Commission outlawed racial discrimination alongside genocide, torture, slavery, the right to self-determination and crimes against humanity as peremptory norms; that is, according to international law, no state can commit them or openly condone them in its laws. There is also a special treaty to combat discrimination against women and persons with disabilities, which places the same obligation on the state, although it has not reached the legal status of peremptory norms.
In Iraq and the Kurdistan Region, despite the equality of citizens in the constitution and many laws, discrimination against women, non-Muslims and, more recently, people of different sexual orientations continues. That is why the Kurdistan Center for International Law, for 2024 and 2025, along with several other work plans, on the one hand is preparing to write a guide on freedom of religion and belief, on the other hand to prepare a bill on combating discrimination in all forms.