OSCE: Religious intolerance in the OSCE space

Written submission of Human Rights Without Frontiers

for the OSCE Human Dimension Implementation Meeting

Working session 10: Tolerance and Non-Discrimination (6 October)

From 29 September to 10 October, the OSCE/ ODIHR is a conference in Warsaw on "The Human Dimension Implementation Meeting." This is the single most important yearly OSCE event focusing on human rights and democracy in Europe, North America, and Central Asia. For two weeks, it reviews how and to what extent governments in the OSCE region have put their human rights and democracy commitments into practice. More than 1,000  participants - government representatives, experts, human rights defenders - are attending the event, making this Europe's largest human rights conference. In the spirit of the Helsinki movement, civil society organizations and the media have full access to all sessions and can discuss issues with government representatives on an equal footing.

Some Reflections About The Scope of Religious Intolerance

HRWF (06.10.2008) - Website: http://www.hrwf.net - Email: info@hrwf.net - In recent years, the participating states of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) have expressed increasing concern over the rising number of hate crimes and violent acts of intolerance throughout the OSCE region.  An excellent report, “Hate Crimes in the OSCE Region: Incidents and Responses,” was presented by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) at its last annual Human Dimension Implementation Meeting (HDIM) held in Warsaw from 24 September to 5 October 2007. 

In this report, the hate crime incidents are structured on the basis of the motivation underpinning hate crimes such as racism and xenophobia. The report documents numerous violent manifestations of hatred toward migrants and other foreign nationals, refugees and asylum-seekers, ethnic minorities, Roma and Sinti, Jews and Muslims, and so on. The section devoted to religiously-motivated intolerance deserves some scrutiny. While singling out hate-motivated crimes against two ethno-religious groups – the Jews and the Muslims- the report has difficulty in defining the whole ‘remaining’ religious spectrum in a neutral and coherent way.  This category named “Christians and other religious groups, including religious minorities and so-called non-traditional or new religious movements” appears a jumble. By naming and highlighting one or more specific denominations as targets of hate crimes, the report contributes to the unnecessary, incessant, and counter-productive fragmentation of the issue. It creates a questionable hierarchy of religions.  It reveals a privileged Europe-centered, biased approach to the conceptual framework.  It also fails to address interreligious intolerance, including intolerance between sub-groups of the same denomination, as well as intolerance by non-state actors, such as the media and cult-watching groups.

Human Rights Without Frontiers thinks that the coverage of religious intolerance in the future reports on hate crimes by the OSCE/ODIHR can be improved in various realms.

Recommendations to the OSCE/ODIHR

Human Rights Without Frontiers recommends to the OSCE/ODIHR: 

- to adopt a comprehensive and consistent approach to the various facets of religious intolerance;

- to include some clarification about the terminology to be used in order to identify the target-groups;

- to establish a typology of concrete acts through which this religious intolerance is manifested.

Concerning the victims of religious intolerance, Human Rights Without Frontiers recommends to use the terms “ethno-religious groups” on one hand and “communities of faith or belief” on the other hand. While this approach would cover the whole spectrum of religious intolerance, one could avoid the sometimes artificial and unconvincing distinctions between racist, religiously-motivated and ethnically-motivated hate crimes committed against individuals and communities with mixed identities such as the Jews, the Muslims, the Sikhs, and so on. The neutral term “communities of faith or belief” used in UN documents also allows to avoid the never-ending and fruitless discussions about “historical” or “non-historical” religions, about so-called “cults” or “sects” to which some stakeholders deny the protection guaranteed by international standards on freedom of religion. The UN terminology also includes a number of groups whose religious nature is contested by some governments and cult-watching groups but who are based on a specific set of beliefs and should therefore enjoy the freedom of belief and all other human rights.

Human Rights Without Frontiers recommends to the OSCE/ ODIHR to structure the section on religious intolerance of its future reports and to articulate the collected data around a typology of concrete acts of intolerance such as violence against individuals, vandalism and attacks on property, desecration of burial places as Human Rights First did in its report “2008 Hate Crime Survey.”

Human Rights Without Frontiers recommends to the OSCE/ ODIHR: 

- to achieve a balanced coverage of religious intolerance throughout the OSCE space so as to avoid complaints by some states about real or perceived double standards;

- to collect data throughout the whole spectrum of ethno-religious groups and communities of faith or belief affected by hate crimes;

to post on its website a standardized complaint form aiming at collecting data according - to its typology of hate crime incidents such as verbal harassment, threats, intolerance in the workplace, cases of defamation in public services and in the private sector, defamation in the media, physical attacks, vandalism and attacks on property, desecration of cemeteries, etc.;

- to collect court decisions on defamation of individuals motivated by their religious affiliation and of religious communities in the OSCE participating states.

The ‘sect’ issue

In most international reports, there is a huge deficit concerning the monitoring of religious intolerance and discrimination outside the so-called “historical religions.” In the last ten years, France, Belgium and Austria have been identified and repeatedly criticized as the main state actors fostering religious intolerance and discrimination in the European Union. Many complaints have been publicly expressed against these three Western European democracies, all related to actions by their governments, by state-financed public and private cult-watching agencies numerous leaders of which have been repeatedly sentenced by courts on the grounds of defamation. It is therefore not “by chance” that since January 2006, there have been 239 acts of vandalism against places of worship of Jehovah's Witnesses, including attacks with Molotov cocktails, an attempted arson, an act of vandalism in a cemetery, tire slashings during a religious service and numerous acts of hate language spray-painted on places of worship, according to the latest report of the US Department of State on freedom of religion or belief published on 19 September 2008.

It is noteworthy to recall that in a 1997 report, UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, Mr. Abdelfattah Amor, said about breaches of public order and crimes committed by certain groups and communities: “(…) there are many legal courses open and they afford plenty of scope for action against false pretences and misdirection. Beyond that however, it is not the business of the State or any other group or community to act as the guardian of people’s consciences and encourage, impose or censure any religious belief or conviction.”

In her report dated 8 March 2006 on her mission to France, UN Special Rapporteur Asma Jahangir urged the French Government to remember “that no one can be judged for his actions other than through the appropriate judicial channels.” She also urged “judicial and conflict resolution mechanisms to no longer refer to, or use, the list published by Parliament in 1996.”

 In line with the UN report, sixteen scholars from nine EU countries co-signed a letter addressed by Human Rights Without Frontiers to the Belgian Government, all the senators and members of the House of Representatives: 

- to declare the list of 189 movements without any juridical value, to monitor and sanction any misuse of it by state and other public authorities;

- to ban the use of the word “secte/ sekt” in any of their statements and reports;

- to use the  terms communities of faith or belief to designate any religious or philosophical group whatever their historicity and their membership; 

- to transform the CIAOSN/ IACSSO into  an independent “Inter-university  Information and Advisory Center on communities of faith and belief” at the service of the social and governmental bodies, and the general public. 

Source:            http://www.hrwf.org