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that is specifically mentioned in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (3) Rights in respect of religious education are downplayed in the Declaration compared with their statement in other instruments. Article VIII allays any fears that the Declaration is a retrogade rather than a progressive step. I cannot underestimate the importance of this document, the drafting of which proved so painful to the international community.

II. Historical Aspects

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I turn to a little history. It is important to recall how recent the development of the right to religious freedom is, at both the national and international level. At the national level, for example, it was not until after the French Revolution that Jews and Protestants in France had full freedom to practice their religion on the same basis as Catholics. In England, there were various kinds of civil and political disabilities on Protestants not members of the Established Church, and on Catholics and Jews, well into the nineteenth century. Religious freedom was by no means the norm throughout colonial America; there were, shining exceptions like Pennsylvania. The broad principle that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." was guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1791,12 but its details are still being worked out by the Courts. Spain and Portugal introduced Catholicism to their colonies, frequently according it even larger exclusive privileges than it was accorded at home. A Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Subcommission

of course,

on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities notes,

not without irony, that:

After the February revolution (1917), the Provisional
Government enacted the Law of 14 July 1917, guarantee-
ing freedom of conscience--including the right to pro-
fess any religion or to profess none--in the former
Russian Empire. After the October revolution (1917), a
decree of the Council of People's Commissars "on the
separation of the Church from the State and the school
from the Church," reaffirming the guarantee of freedom
of conscience and equality of all religions, was signed
by Lenin on 23 January 1918. This was the first legis-
lation enacted by the Soviet State on the subject. It
laid down legal provisions governing the relations be-
tween the State and religious associations, and abol-
ished the domination over the faiths which the Orthodox
Church had exercised in Czarist Russia. Thus the con-
cept of the right to freedom of thought, conscience,
and religion was given de jure or legal recognition by
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.13

No mention is made of the de facto situation (which was surely different, but the Soviet Union is certainly not the only state where the de facto situation lags behind the de jure one). More recently Hitler's efforts to exterminate the Jews are a grim reminder that religious hatred did not disappear in the twentieth century.

At the international level, sporadic recognition (de jure and at times de facto) of the right of religious freedom may be noted. There was, for example, the Treaty of 1536 between Francis I of France and Suleiman I of the Ottoman Empire, which became the precedent for many later "capitulation" treaties in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It allowed the establishment of French merchants in Turkey and granted them individual and religious freedom, as well as taking many of their affairs out of the jurisdiction of the Ottoman courts. The Treaty

of Osnabruck, entered into in 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years' War, provided some degree of toleration for Catholics in states which had established Protestant churches and for Protestants in Catholic states. The Treaty of Berlin of 1878 contained provisions requiring the Ottoman Empire and the newly-independent states, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania and Servia, to assure religious freedom to all their nationals. At the end of the First World War, as part of the peace settlement, treaty obligations to respect minority rights, including religious rights, were undertaken (or imposed upon) most of the new states carved out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Turkey and the Balkan states. Several other states, upon admission to the League of Nations, made declarations to the Council of the League that they too would guarantee minority rights. Although there were rudimentary procedures to enforce these obligations, the overall success was not great. Suggestions by Woodrow Wilson and Lord Robert Cecil to include religious protections in the League of Nations Covenant itself were eventually dropped.

At the 1945 San Francisco Conference during which the United Nations Charter was drafted, representatives of a number of small countries--Chile, Cuba, New Zealand, Norway and Panama--argued strenuously for the inclusion in the Charter of precise and detailed provisions relating to the freedom of thought, conscience and religion. Their efforts were unavailing. The Charter merely refers in a general way in Article 1, paragraph 3, and in Article 55 to the promotion of "human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion."

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The only slightly less general language in Article 18 of the 14 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and now the Declaration, can best be seen as efforts to give concrete detail to the very general Charter norms.

A recent highly significant recognition of the principle of religious freedom which requires mention is that contained in Principle VII of the Final Act of the 1975 Helsinki Conference on 16 Security and Cooperation in Europe:

The participating States will respect human rights and
fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought,
conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinc-
tion as to race, sex, language or religion.

They will promote and encourage the effective exercise
of civil, political, economic, social, cultural and
other rights and freedoms all of which derive from the
inherent dignity of the human person and are essential
for his free and full development.

Within this framework the participating States will
recognize and respect the freedom of the individual to
profess and practise, alone or in community with others,
religion or belief acting in accordance with the dic-
tates of his own conscience.

The question of compliance with this obligation has proved to be a highly controversial one at the Belgrade and Madrid followups to Helsinki.17

III. Current Examples of Religious Persecution

In preparing for this testimony, I had thought that I might be able to lay my hands on a comprehensive study of contemporary examples of religious persecution. To my surprise, none of the scholars or Non-governmental Organizations working in this area appear to produce such a study. I did come across a survey of

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religious freedom by the United Presbyterians listing the ten most suppressive and most free nations. Some material can, of course, be gleaned from the annual Amnesty International Report by looking under the entry for each country at what violations took place. Many of them suggest aspects of religious persecution.19

One can

make a similar analysis of the State Department's annual country 20 reports on Human Rights. Neither of these sources really gives a comprehensive picture, although they do hint at a global problem. Some other sources are worth noting to underscore the global nature of persecution: A set of essays published a few years back contains material on religious repression of one sort or another in the Soviet bloc countries, the Arab Middle East and Pakistan as 21 well as interdenominational discrimination in Israel. Jack, the Secretary-General of the World Conference on Religion and Peace, upset a lot of Governments when, using church sources, he named names and gave a number of examples of persecution at the 1975 Session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. His examples were:

Dr. Homer

1. The treatment of Muslims in the Southern Philippines

by the central government, a situation giving rise

to a claim of genocide.

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2. The legal and social discrimination practised in

Pakistan against the Ahmadiyas, a non-orthodox Muslim
group in the Islamic state.

3. Discrimination against the 4,000 Jews in Syria who
are said to be forbidden to travel more than 2.5
miles from their homes, prevented from observing

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