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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Human Security in Islam HUMAN SECURITY ================= The idea of protecting survival of states was challenged, when the UN published its Human Development Report 1994. In the report human security as a concept emerged and began to attract academia and government officials attention. Since then, its slogan “freedom from fear and freedom from wants” became famous world wide.

Human security refers to a kind of security that does not focus on either the traditional “national security” nor even on the expanded “comprehensive security,” both of which are concerned first with the entity of the state. It focuses instead on the importance of protecting the well-being of the human race - not just the security of one’s own people, but of all-cutting across distinctions and boundaries of nationality and ethnicity, class and culture, gender, and religion.

UN human security included seven categories of security and wellbeing that are necessary to ensure those two freedoms: food, health, economic, environmental, personal, community and political security. Following that in 1999, (at the state level) a group of foreign ministers met in Norway and formed Human Security Network (HSN).

The aims of HSN is “… to energize political process aimed at preventing or solving conflicts and promoting peace and development” (http://www.humansecuritynetwork.org/principle_e.php)(visited 5/07/2007). The shifting paradigm from protecting of the state to the protecting of the people continue to invite a hot debate among the academia. By focusing on people, human security does not mean that we totally exclude state, since many of the human security issues require state’s action and commitment.

What is needed is the serious commitment of state to protect the people, the backbone of a state. Other than the fourteen members of HSN, Japan is another major player that has adopted the human security approach in its foreign policy formulations.

Unlike Canada, which has focused on human rights as important elements of human security, Japan’s approach of human security has been more on development which has been exemplified in its Official Development Assistance (ODA) as well as displaced people and refugees.