Czech Ambassador Robert Rehák & Petra Kaplanová have kindly made available a video recording of the opening speeches at the recent Prague IRFBA Ministerial Conference “Freedom of Religion under Authoritarian Regimes”. Watch & Listen to my address here:
“Freedom of Religion Under Authoritarian Regimes” Opening address at the Conference of Government Ministers on Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Nov 28, 2023 | News
Prague, 28th November 2023
Lord Alton of Liverpool
Next week on December 9th we will mark the 75th anniversary of the proclamation of the Convention on the Prevention on the Crime Of Genocide (Genocide Convention) – the first human rights treaty adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations – it signified the international community’s commitment to ‘never again’ after the Holocaust and associated atrocities committed during the Second World War.
It was the work of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish lawyer, 49 of whose relatives were murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust. It was in response to a lifetime of studying atrocities like the mass murder of the Assyrian and Armenian Christians; it was in response to Winston Churchill’s radio broadcast in which he said there was no word in the English language adequate to describe the monstrous crimes of the Reich.
It was a word whose etymology is drawn from the Latin and ancient Greek – genos and cide– meaning the severing, the cutting, the breaking, the annihilation of part of the human family.
This crime above all crimes – often originating in a visceral hatred of others because of their religion or ethnicity – finally had a name – with duties on States to predict, prevent, protect, and punish – but 75 years later it is still a crime committed with impunity.
The following day on December 10th, 1948, the United Nations promulgated the 30 articles contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)– Article 18 of which insists that every member of the human family has the right to believe, not to believe or to change their belief. It is the duty of the UN Human Rights Council, the General Assembly, and the Security Council to uphold what is a sacred duty – but it too is daily honoured in its breach, notably by authoritarian regimes.
There is a direct link between the UDHR and the Genocide Convention – because when you ignore the human rights of individuals, including religious freedom – and choose silence rather than risk censure – it invariably leads to persecution, then to atrocities, and then to genocide.
Edith Stein, murdered by the Nazis was right stating that ‘Those who remain silent are responsible.’ Another victim of the Nazis, Poland’s Maximillian Kolbe, could have been speaking to our own times when he said, ‘the deadliest poison of our age is indifference’ while Germany’s great theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said ‘not to speak is to speak, not to act, is to act.’
This fundamental and foundational freedom is routinely ignored by policymakers.
As a boy, I was shocked but also inspired by the stories from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union about the suffering of believers and the nature of totalitarianism.
My father had enlisted as a soldier after the Nazis invaded Poland and had been at the Battle of Monte Casino and told me about the extraordinary bravery of Polish soldiers. I had read about the 1956 Hungarian uprising, the imprisonment of religious and political dissenters; and in 1968 as a 17-year-old, organised a town protest and a public petition following the crushing of Alexander Dubček’s Prague Spring, when Soviet tanks crushed modest attempts at Czech liberalisation.
I once met Vaclav Havel, here in Prague, who described how, during the communist era in Czechoslovakia, it felt as if everyone had been compromised by the nature of the regime: that personal survival had become their foremost consideration.
He said that the population was living a lie in which truth had become the first casualty; that ‘the saving message is that the truth prevails for those who live in truth,’ adding that, in the formation of the next generation of leaders, this message ‘might be inscribed on the Moses baskets of every nation’s babies.’
I went with him and a small group to Lidice,the Czech village chosen as a target for reprisals in the wake of the assassination of the Gestapo’s Heydrich – a principal architect of the Holocaust. In reprisal, 172 boys and men between 14 to 84 were shot and most of the women and children sent to concentration camps. The village had been destroyed. But the story didn’t end there because in 1947 a British MP, Sir Barnett Stross, raised the money to build a new village.
Perhaps as I share some tragic stories today, we can keep in mind the possibility and the challenge that even out of such horror, we always have the chance to rebuild and renew.
Last year at least 360 million Christians experienced ‘high levels of persecution and discrimination’ worldwide, 13 Christians are killed every day because of their faith.
Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Baha’i, Yazidis, Ahmadis, Hazara Shia, Humanists and many others suffer in societies where no respect is shown for Article 18.
As a small way of addressing silence, ignorance, and indifference, several years ago I suggested to the Board of Aid to the Church in Need, on which I served, that we should at least use one day each year – during the November month of remembrance – to commemorate the victims of religious persecution, and that we should call it Red Wednesday.
Just a week ago, with my good friend, Fiona Bruce MP, we took part in Red Wednesday events in the UK Parliament – reminding ourselves that we should, to use an English idiom, ‘see red’, and not be indifferent to the suffering caused by religious persecution. It is a major factor in conflict, the displacement worldwide of 110 million people, and the failure to make developmental progress towards more prosperous, harmonious, and stable societies, and societies where the human dignity of every individual is affirmed and protected.
Religious freedom is a cause that came looking for me rather than the other way round.
In 1979, as a new MP, I became involved in the campaign to free seven Siberian Pentecostal Christians who in 1978 had taken refuge in the American Embassy in Moscow. It took five years – and interventions from Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II – before, in June 1983, they were allowed to leave the Soviet Union.
Repeatedly, individual cases and stories like these inspired me and made me see how we take our own religious liberties for granted. Their stories matter.
The campaigns for the Siberian Seven led to the formation of the Jubilee Campaign and a private visit to the family of the jailed Christian musician, Valeri Barinov in what was then Leningrad – St. Petersburg. I also visited notable Jewish refuseniks like Vladimir and Martha Slepak and later, campaigned for the Orthodox dissenter, Alexander Ogorodnikov.
Through my political work, I had the opportunity to visit Romania and took the opportunity to successfully raise the case of an Orthodox priest imprisoned by Ceausescu, and to later campaign for and meet Richard Wurmbrand, tortured and imprisoned for 14 years, Cardinal Alexandru Todea – the Greek Catholic priest who spent 16 years in prison and 27 years under house arrest, the wonderful resistance leader, Doina Cornea, and László Tőkés, the Protestant clergyman who became the hero of the 1989 Revolution – and to be with him in 2019 to commemorate those events in Timisoara.
Knowing their stories led to the building of alliances with likeminded people across political divides, going and seeing for myself; collecting the evidence; and not merely relying on press and second-hand reports. It is the only way to make Article 18 more than a political slogan.
Meeting those who have been beaten, tortured, imprisoned, raped, or bereaved never leaves you unchanged. You can’t put your hands into someone else’s wounds and remain unaffected. It is our job to give voice to the stories.
William Wilberforce once famously said that once the facts had been laid before the House of Commons no one could any longer use the excuse that they did not know.
As recently as last Thursday in Parliament in calling for the recognition of the Ukrainian Holodomor – Stalin’s 1932-33 mass starvation of Ukraine—as a genocide – I recalled how in 1989, with a small Jubilee Campaign delegation, I went to Lviv, and had never forgotten the sheer courage and determination of faith-inspired pro-democracy activists risking their lives to throw off the shackles and chains of the Soviet Union.
As George Weigel puts it ‘the secret of courage is faith: faith in a larger reality than ourselves.’
I visited Greek Catholic churches that Stalin had closed 40 years earlier and where, every day, fresh flowers were defiantly left at the doors to replace the ones removed earlier by Soviet soldiers.
Religious belief had been violently repressed. Bishop Pavlo Vasylyk and Ivan Gel, a politician and dissident, had spent 17 and 18 years in the Soviet death camp at Perm.
I met a young priest, sent three years earlier to Chernobyl, without any protective clothing, to clear radioactive waste for publicly celebrating the liturgies.
Those people wanted their stories known, and I was grateful to the BBC and the Independent newspaper for enabling that to happen.
The stories matter because they illustrate why, even as we meet here in Prague, Ukrainians are fighting to the bitter end to protect their hard-won freedoms and will resist Putin’s mendacious attempts to crush democratic rights and sovereignty, to roll the clock back and reverse the gains made across Europe with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The War in Ukraine is not merely about territory, it is about the very soul of a nation.
It is about the attempted extinction, the annihilation of a nation. That is why its 42 million people have become its army. But this is also a war against the post-Cold War European order. It is notable that President Zelenskiy is the grandson of a man whose three Jewish brothers were all murdered, executed by the Nazis.
None of us who enjoy those freedoms can retreat into our own little world and forget what is happening beyond. We cannot hide in the phoney comfort and isolation of a neutral world of cuckoo clocks, skis resorts and chocolate.
In 1984, on the 40th anniversary of the D-Day Landings in Normandy, Ronald Reagan said ‘We’ve learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent.’
It was true then and it is true now – not least as we contemplate the axis of dictators of Xi, Putin, Kim, and Khamenei –every bit as dangerous as the axis which confronted the World War Two allies.
In Hamlet William Shakespeare has Claudius observe that ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.’
It would be a grave mistake to see this alliance of dictators, theocrats, authoritarians, and jihadists as separate threats.
Their ideological differences will be parked temporarily as they use one another to pursue their shared hatred of the free world and its democracies.
Take, North Korea, which I have visited. There are 300,000 people in concentration camps – many incarcerated for religious beliefs. The UN’s own Commission of Inquiry called it a ‘state without parallel’, accused it of crimes against humanity, and compared it with the Reich.
Yet 10 years later it has still failed to refer those responsible to the International Criminal Court.
A week ago, I handed President Yoon of the Republic of Korea, a letter urging him to use the ROK’s forthcoming membership of the Security Council to champion religious freedom and especially the plight of the hundreds of escapees – many of whom have religious beliefs – and who are being forcibly returned to North Korea by China – in breach of the 1951 Refugee Convention.
He met a young escapee who came to my university office ten years ago. He was tortured in North Korea, and inspired by his faith, has worked tirelessly to tell the story of others. He has secured a Masters degree, worked in Parliament, now serves as secretariat to our all-party group on North Korea,
Timothy works for the day when the North will enjoy all the freedoms won in the vibrant and free South – secured against a military dictatorship by the jailed democratic leader, who had faced execution, the Catholic, Kim Dae-Jung and his formidable Methodist wife, Lee Hee-ho.
I have always been perplexed by the political activists who remain silent about Communist totalitarianism.
As a student in the 1970s, I refused to join with contemporaries, who as liberals, should have known better, in support of the Red Guards in China.
Where were the protests as Mao’s ideology and policies – everything from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution – led to vast numbers of deaths – estimated to range from 40 to 80 million. Mass starvation, mass executions, prison labour, and persecution – on grounds of ethnicity, religion, and political dissent – were the hallmarks of a truly evil despotic regime.
Mao unleashed a brutal campaign of ‘re-education’ of its citizens, terrorised any form of dissent, and viciously crushed traditional ways of life and religion in places like Tibet.
Under successive leaders it has crushed dissent in the massacre of Tiananmen Square, destroyed democracy and two systems one country in Hong Kong – where religious freedom is now increasingly under attack – daily threatens the 23 million people of Taiwan, and instigated a genocide of Uyghur Muslims.
Where have been the protests as Xi Jinping Thought, in emulation of Mao, in imposing his own cult of personality and authoritarianism, replaces scripture and the Holy Bible, as pastors and bishops are imprisoned, and reports last week of mosques shut down in Ningxia and Gansu. The compliant silence from countries who are now indebted vassal states and should be concerned about the fate of their coreligionists has been deafening
In the early 1980s, I travelled to Shanghai, met underground Christians, and heard the story of its jailed bishop, Ignatius Kung, who spent 30 years in CCP jails.
Later I was in Western China and met fearful Uyghur Muslims. I have met the Dalai Lama – and my university and city were threatened by the CCP for doing so. Having visited Tibet, in Parliament, I have hosted testimony sessions from Buddhist monks –from a Uyghur doctor who was forced to remove organs of Falun Gong – and for exiled Hong Kongers and the family of Jimmy Lai – one of 1200 jailed in Hong Kong and, like arrested lawyers Martin Lee and Margaret Ng, inspired by his religious faith.
And let’s not forget the story of the courageous young woman, Zhang Zhan, inspired by her faith to become a journalist and lawyer, and after going to Wuhan to ask all the right questions about the origins of Covid – which has killed at least 3 million people – was tortured and given a 4-year prison sentence. She has written these words: ‘Even if I were a bruised reed, I won’t break. Even if I were a dying lamp, I won’t be extinguished.’
To those who seek accommodations and concordats with the CCP, I would simply say, never forget that no regime or organisation in our global history has killed more people than the CCP.
In other parts of the world, a different ideology threatens religious freedom, diversity, and pluralism.
On Red Wednesday last week Fiona and I met Dominic and Margaret. 18 months ago, in Owo, Ondo State, their church of St. Francis Xavier was attacked by Jihadists, and 40 congregants were murdered. Margaret’s shattered legs had to be amputated. In a culture of impunity, no one has been charged or brought to justice.
Last year their bishop, Bishop Jude, came to Parliament and spoke at a meeting I chaired. He warned British officials that it was insulting and illiterate to attribute such atrocities to climate change. Did they not understand Jihadist ideology?
I have met Rebecca Sharibu, the mother of Leah, who, aged 14, was one of the schoolgirls seized in 2018 at Dapchi in Yobe State by Boko Haram/ISIS West Africa. She refused to renounce her faith, was forcibly converted, raped, impregnated, and enslaved. She is still alive, yet the Nigerian Government have failed to release her.
Religious persecution is on the rise across Africa. It is self-evident across the Sahel. It is a major factor in the recent wave of fresh genocidal attacks in Darfur – directed against the wrong kind of African Muslims by Arab Sudanese Jihadists – it is a contagion that could threaten the stability and future of vast numbers of people.
It is the same virus at work in Pakistan – which I visited in 2019 to help secure the release of Asia Bibi – the illiterate Christian sentenced to death for fabricated charges of blasphemy.
It turns minorities, including Ahmadis and Hindus, into second-class citizens with Christians given employment in menial work such as cleaning sewers and latrines.
In neighbouring Afghanistan, the Taliban perpetrate genocide against Hazara and, in India, religious minorities, including Christians and Muslims, face horrific attacks by Hindutva extremists.
By contrast, Pakistan, and India’s founding fathers, Mohamud Ali Jinnah and Jawaharlal Nehru both championed the principle of religious freedom and inclusion.
Elsewhere, in the Middle East, it is impossible to understand the present crisis without knowing the stories of the Abrahamic faiths – and I cannot fail to recall my visits to Palestinian refugee camps, to Israel’s Yad Vashem, to the ancient churches in Turkey and Egypt, and to the Yazidis in Northern Iraq, without wondering how the Genocide Convention and the UDHR speak into today’s suffering and pain and the urgent- and desperate need to find peaceful political solutions based on the high and noble ideals of the great faiths – not on slogans threatening to eradicate Jewish people “from the river to the sea.”
When terrorist ideologies – or theocratic dictatorships like that in Iran – use those great faiths to promote atrocities, scholars, and religious and political leaders must say so.
I will never forget my visit in 2019 to Simile in Iraq. In 1933 Raphael Lemkin had studied what happened there to Assyrian Christians after a massacre in the name of religion was perpetrated. You can still see fragments of human bone protruding from the rubbish tip where those innocent people were murdered.
The failure to ensure consequences would lead to further atrocities – to a slowburn genocide which began in 1915 with the Armenians. It continues to this day with the ethnic cleansing of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh – where they have lived for centuries.
Recall that Adolf Hitler, as he planned the Holocaust, said ‘who now remembers the Armenians?’ Do we?
Recall that in our own times, secure in their belief that they could hunt down people who were different, in 2014, ISIS launched a violent attack against the Yazidis in Sinjar.
It then attacked the Christian villages of Nineveh plains, forcing 120,000 people to flee for their lives in the middle of the night. Thousands of men were killed; boys were forced to become child soldiers; and thousands of women and girls were kidnapped for sexual slavery.
Last week in a Parliamentary Committee I once again raised our failure to investigate, prosecute or bring to justice those responsible for heinous crimes.
And this is hardly a fringe or peripheral issue. Four out of five people have a religious belief, and the denial of religious liberty is always a harbinger.
Those countries that deny religious freedom are serial human rights abusers – denying every other human right too. It is a litmus test. Nations that uphold religious freedom uphold other freedoms too. That is why it matters so much.
My late mother was a native Irish speaker who, I was told, came from a family of seanchaí – those who in the oral tradition handed down the stories from one generation to another.
We owe it to those whose freedoms have been compromised or denied their liberty to learn their stories and to hand them on, especially as we come to mark the anniversaries of Article 18 and the UDHR, and of the Genocide Convention – and the events which 75 years ago led to their proclamation.
Thank you for inviting me to give this opening address at your important conference today.
