27th February, 2013
A coalition of advocacy groups will be calling for nations to respect universally acknowledged standards of religious freedom at an event to be held as the United Nations Human Rights Council meets in Geneva next month.
The groups – who include everyone from the Jubilee Campaign to the All India Christian Council, World Evangelical Alliance, Christian Solidarity Worldwide and the International Institute on Religious Freedom – intends calling on the international community to confront what they say is a "serious threat" to human rights.
Ann Buwalda, executive director of the Jubilee Campaign, says the freedom to "believe and manifest one’s beliefs forms the basis of our international system and should be respected in law and practice".
"Religious freedom is not merely threatened by violent and uneducated mobs. We are increasingly seeing laws and legal arguments which violate religious freedom and, in a larger sense, the idea of individual human rights itself."
The groups says that incidents including man being put on death row in Iran, a lynch mob screaming for the blood of an underage girl in Pakistan, and police in India arresting the victim of a violent assault for "disturbing communal harmony" are just a few of the "thousands of violations of religious freedom taking place around the world".
The call will be made on 6th March. The 22nd session of the UN’s Human Rights Council opened earlier this week and runs until 22nd March.
– DAVID ADAMS
