Threats to Religious Freedom in Europe
by Roger Trigg
By failing to recognize the importance of religion and its relationship to human rights, European courts are progressively eroding religious liberty.
At the end of May, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (the final European Court of Appeal) rejected a request for referral to it of three contentious religious freedom cases from the United Kingdom. This means that the European Court's initial less-than-friendly rulings on religious freedom still stand, and they will undoubtedly help erode respect for religious freedom throughout Europe.
The court, under the auspices of the Council of Europe, is distinct from the agencies of the European Union, and processes litigation from forty-seven countries, including Russia and Turkey. Over the years, the council's Parliamentary Assembly has betrayed an endemic suspicion of religion, and following a tradition of French secularism, has tended to see religion as a threat to human freedom, instead of its possible basis.
This thinking can be traced to the later French Enlightenment, with its exaltation of a rationalism that led to materialism, and markedly differs from the early Enlightenment thought of John Locke. Locke believed reason was rooted in divine nature, the "candle of the Lord" as he put it. His deep influence on English politics in the Glorious Revolution of 1689 and the American founding resulted in documents that upheld a divine grounding for human rights.
In contradiction of this view, the Council of Europe affirmed in 2007 that "states must require religious leaders to take an unambiguous stand in favour of the precedence of human rights, as set forth in the European Convention of Human Rights, over any religious principle."
It is ironic that freedom of religion is expressly protected by the Convention and that the council recognizes this protection, because now the right to manifest one's religion is highly qualified. In the council's words, "a religion whose doctrine or practice [runs] counter to other fundamental rights would be unacceptable."
In Europe, as opposed to the United States, freedom of religion translates to "freedom of religion or belief," a phrase that covers not just atheism, but "philosophies" like vegetarianism or environmentalism. "Religion," however defined, is no longer regarded as a unique contribution to the common good.
The result of this is that when more systems of belief invoke protection, the less effective that protection can be. When everything is protected nothing can be. "Freedom of religion or belief," a concept that can only be broadly and vaguely defined, is easily subordinated to wider considerations of public policy.
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Here is one more video clip, from CBN:
And here is one more article, at the Daily Caller; the last two sections are the most important-where do we go from here?
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