Leaders in government, business and news turn to Freedom for coverage of significant issues, often contributing articles on important social concerns. The tenacity, thoroughness and accuracy of its research and reporting have resulted in acclaim for Freedom’s investigative journalism.

When placed under the public spotlight, governmental bodies and vested interests often throw human rights to the wolves and will attempt to silence an outspoken media voice such as Freedom. For example, for the past 25 years, Freedom has been relentless in exposing the perpetrators of the violent and criminal activity of deprogramming — in which members of religions are abducted and imprisoned, while their captors assault them physically and mentally in an effort to coerce them to abandon their chosen beliefs. In one recent case in France, Freedom exposed a government-funded front group responsible for institutionalising a young woman, solely because she had joined a minority religious movement. Freedom’s exposure of the case led to a spurious suit against the magazine, backed by the government-funded organisation. But the French court ruled in favour of Freedom, agreeing that the revelations in the article were a matter of public interest. This set a new precedent in France allowing the media to aggressively investigate and expose government-funded discrimination.

In Germany, Freedom has successfully turned back several attempts to quash its investigative reporting, including criminal complaints brought by corrupt politicians who wanted to avoid exposure of their human rights violations. All such proceedings were in the end dismissed in Freedom’s favour. At one time, the government funded an organisation that brought a lawsuit to halt Freedom’s outspokenness. A federal court finally ended the onslaught, ruling that for the government to fund such activity was unconstitutional. By defeating these and other attempts to suppress matters of public interest, Freedom is playing its part in helping safeguard citizens from the chilling effect of litigation brought by government officials and organisations whose sole motive is to prevent their abuses and human rights violations from being publicly exposed and condemned.

Minority religious organisations are prime targets for stereotyping in the media. When they then try to provide correct information to the public about who they are and what they do, government bodies have often suppressed their right to freedom of speech, in some cases imprisoning members of religious minorities simply because they distributed church literature. Whereas some groups tend to accept such restrictions, the Church of Scientology holds that to accede to discrimination for one is to condone it for all. Thus, the Church has, time and again, gone to court to defend the right of a minority to express its views in public. After all, the true quality of a democracy is best measured by how well a government treats its minorities.

Freedom magazine has garnered a unique reputation for tackling head-on the most difficult stories that the establishment media is often loath to investigate.

For example, in March 1996, the Church challenged an ordinance prohibiting its members from erecting a public information stand in the city of Clichy-La-Garenne. The Administrative Court of Paris ruled that the ordinance “unlawfully interferes with the enjoyment of religious freedom... embodied both in the 1789 Declaration on Human Rights [of France] and the European Convention on Human Rights....” The ruling created a valuable precedent that helped establish the validity of basic human rights law for all religious organisations and restored their right to free speech and expression.

Officials are obligated to conventions laid down by intergovernmental bodies such as the United Nations to respect the liberty of parents to ensure the religious and moral education of their children is in conformity with their own convictions. Therefore, when in 1999 the Education Ministry in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland tried to close down a private school that employed Mr. Hubbard’s educational methods, Scientologists refused to be cowed.

The school had operated successfully since 1987. But in 1999, the Ministry ordered the school to close. The school’s top administrator proved that the Ministry’s denial was illegal because it was based solely on her religious affiliation. The school subsequently filed a complaint with the United Nations on human rights grounds, which was reported by the media. Additionally, the local community, impressed by the Scientologists’ determination and the school’s excellent results, swung over in support. This left the Education Ministry with no choice but to bow to the public pressure. It issued the school its license in 2000 — a victory that struck a blow for the rights of everyone to both educational choice and religious freedom.