Religious Freedom in Democratic Societies
EHF President David Pollock took part in an international conference on Religious Freedom in Democratic Societies in Cordoba on 3-4 May 2010. The conference was run by the EU Council’s current Spanish Presidency and the UN Alliance of Civilisations. About 200 people from across Europe took part - academics, religious figures, politicians, diplomats and people from a variety of NGOs.David Pollock reports:
This was a rich occasion, impossible to summarise save to say that it was characterised by goodwill and that, although there was little that was positively objectionable in what was said, the non-religious were constantly overlooked and a few people showed a regrettable tendency to talk carelessly of the rights of religious communities.
I submitted a paper which was circulated to everyone and made three oral contributions. In the first plenary session I pointed out that even the official Concept paper for the conference ignored the non-religious - to the extent of summarising Article 17 without mentioning us. I said that, now that the Lisbon Treaty had finally set the dialogue with churches and non-confessional organisations in law, we wanted to take part on an equal footing and not to be patronised, marginalised and sidelined as had happened so far.
I also objected then and more strongly in a later workshop session to talk of collective rights. Gregor Puppinck of the European Centre for Law and Justice, a company of Christian lawyers whose aim is "to protect the rights of believers to worship and share the message of Jesus Christ without fear of persecution or discrimination in Europe", had deplored the European Court of Human Rights’ decision in the Lautsi case as "the negation of the religious and cultural desire of the immense majority of the Italian population". I said firmly that human rights were individual rights. They could be expressed collectively, but only with willing participation and not at the expense of other individuals’ rights.Group "rights" were not rights at all but privileges for conservative and invariably male so-called "community leaders", enabling them to avoid reappraising questionable group traditions. Group rights were the worst manifestation of so-called multiculturalism, by which people are assigned willy-nilly to religious or ethnic groups whose "culture" is treated as beyond criticism. Under the rubric of group rights and culture, daughters are married off in arranged or even forced marriages, women, gays and the few who dare to think for themselves are oppressed, and eventually their sacred beliefs are protected even to the extent of burning books (as in the Rushdie affair or, metaphorically, with the Danish cartoons). This was where things would end if recognised individual human rights were overruled in favour of what Puppinck had called "the legitimate interest of Italian society".
These remarks produced many expressions of agreement both in the meeting and afterwards.
In the final plenary session, after the reports from the four workshops had all used exclusive language of "inter-religious" dialogue and "faith" communities, I intervened to point out that there was a spectrum of belief from the firmest religious conviction through many degrees of less certain faith and of religious conformity without belief to non-religious humanist and atheist beliefs. All had been protected, as "religion or belief", in all human rights conventions and treaties since the 1940s and 1950s. Both policy and dialogue - and ‘religious’ education - needed to recognise the full range, but sadly our ways of speaking had not adapted to this need for inclusiveness. I urged everyone to consciously seek to adjust their vocabulary to be inclusive of humanists and atheists. This contribution was met with applause.