Multi-Faith Human Rights Coalition Launches New Advocacy Group

Zoltan Grozli,
Freedom Magazine
Hungarian Edition

While nations across Europe attempt to dismantle barriers of ethnic and religious discrimination, incidents of intolerance and oppression continue to mount.

As the year progressed across Europe, menacing acts of hate surfaced, with fire bombings of a Jewish social center in Paris and a synagogue in Moscow. Neo-Nazi vandals along the France-Germany border randomly harassed Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities. In Alsace province, hate mongers toppled gravestones and spray-painted walls and signboards with swastikas and other Nazi symbols. “The attacks are poisoning the atmosphere here,” Jewish leader Pierre Levy told The Guardian.

This confrontational atmosphere has in no small part been due to the creation by extremists in the French parliament of the now infamous 1995 blacklist of so-called “sects.” Not only religious minorities suffer, but also mainline Christian groups. In February 2005, for example, Montreuil Mayor JP Brard, known for his vehement attacks on religion, broke up services at four different evangelical churches, harassing the groups’ leaders and members. He reportedly shouted at the pastor of the Evangelical Missionary Center, “You will learn that here prayers are done within the heart; there is no need to sing.”

“Models of Tolerance”

In varying degrees and forms, such intolerance persists across the European landscape, thwarting efforts to root it out. Against that backdrop of injustice toward Europe’s ethnic and religious minorities, the European Foundation for Human Rights and Tolerance was formed earlier this year.

On February 21, 2005, at the Church of Scientology’s European headquarters in Copenhagen, religious leaders, human rights advocates, scholars and civic experts from throughout Europe gathered to establish an alliance dedicated to resolving one looming question: In a world fraught with intolerance, how do we nurture pluralism and build a stable society?

With more than 250 people in attendance, the Foundation made known its primary aim: to reverse the trend of religious and racial discrimination currently manifested through repressive legislation or administrative decrees in several nations of Europe.

Inclusive of all religions—and with board members including Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Scientologist representatives, as well as experts in human rights and constitutional law, the new Foundation proposed to establish local “models of tolerance.” Through these multi-ethnic and multi-faith entities, each member can, within his or her own community and country, bring diverse groups and government leaders together to accomplish legislative and administrative solutions that advance freedom of choice, association and belief in all European nations.

Aldo Natale Terrin, philosophy and history of religion professor at Catholic University in Milano and the University of Urbino, told Freedom, “I see global importance for this new European Foundation for Human Rights and Tolerance. I wholeheartedly give it my support, so that nations and peoples may gain a better understanding of one another and thereby help bring about greater human rights standards everywhere.”

Safeguarding Fundamental Freedoms

Punctuating that message in the event’s opening address was Gibril Deen, executive director of the Mahatma Gandhi Association in Budapest. A veteran of many human rights campaigns since his organization’s founding in 1992, Deen stated, “Too often in the countries of the entire world—including Hungary—those who are defenseless and unprotected are oppressed by prejudice and abuse of power. We intercede in some 400 cases each year when people are prejudged ‘not normal’ and then treated unfairly, simply because of their country of origin.”

Deen described his association’s grassroots efforts to curb racism and intolerance in this country through sports. “We believe sport is one of the most effective ways to overcome communicational problems between differing nationalities,” he said. “Our organization was the first in Hungary to join the ‘Sport against Racism’ movement in the autumn of 2003, when we started our ‘Show the Red Card to Racism’ tolerance campaign in secondary and high schools of Budapest and the countryside.”

Another attendee, Karen Klint, a member of the Danish parliament and deputy chairperson of the parliament’s Church Committee, applauded this and other grassroots initiatives. She called upon the new Foundation to lead the way, stating, “We must all help to promote peace and tolerance. We cannot leave this to statesmen, politicians or other elected representatives.”

A Step in the Right Direction

And now, concurrent with the actions set in motion with the formation of the Foundation, progress is being made in resolving intolerance toward the religious beliefs and practices of others.

Within days of that inaugural conference, several months ago, a coalition of religious movement representatives had filed an historic complaint with a UN special rapporteur, seeking to void the French government’s intolerant and bigoted edict—the aforementioned 1995 blacklist of religious groups.

And then came the news on May 27, 2005, that the blacklist had been cancelled by then former Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin as one of his last official acts.

This outcome is precisely what the Foundation exists to advance: people of every religion or ethnicity working together to end intolerance toward any religion or ethnicity.