The pope at the UN, human rights and religious freedom
Milan (AsiaNews) - On the eve of the pope's speech at the UN, which will focus on the topic of human rights, Janne Haaland Matlary - in an interview with Mondo e Missione - is reviving the decisive question of religious freedom, as a fundamental right of the person, calling to task the world of politics. And she issues a challenge to Europe: we have much to learn from the United States about the protection of fundamental human rights, beginning with religious rights.
"We have never been in a political situation better than today's for promoting human rights and religious freedom. Now all the governments are talking about human rights: even China and Cuba! This is the moment to pose the question forcefully: the UN, NGO's, lobbying groups, the churches, all must act. For example, the Muslims arriving in Europe today enjoy religious freedom, they can build mosques and schools; Christians must ask for the same thing when they come to majority Muslim countries".
This is what Janne Haaland Matlary - former deputy foreign minister in Norway (from 1997 to 2000), now back at her post as professor of political affairs at the University of Oslo - affirms with conviction in an interview in the latest issue of Mondo e Missione, a monthly of the PIME. Because of her competency and Catholic sensibility, the Scandinavian scholar has been called by the Holy See on a number of occasions to be part of its own diplomatic staff on particularly delicate missions, like the UN conference on demography in Cairo in 1994, and on women the following year in Beijing.
A member of the pontifical council for justice and peace, she has recently published a book, Human rights abandoned? That threat of a dictatorship of relativism (Eupress - Facoltà teologica di Lugano), accompanied by a bibliography compiled by then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
In her interview with Mondo e Missione (inside a special edition entitled "Right to believe, right to live. Religious freedom challenges politics"), Matlary dwells upon the topic of religious freedom by comparing the attitude of the United States to that of Europe. "Some nations, like the United States, are very concerned about this topic and place it on the agenda on various political levels, even during their diplomatic dialogues. In Europe, instead, there is lukewarm interest toward this subject. In particular, the socialist governments have very little interest in religious freedom, because they do not demonstrate a positive disposition toward religion itself".
This is not a confessional initiative, on the contrary. "The battle for religious freedom", Matlary specifies, "is not at all a Catholic or Christian question. The human right to be free in professing a faith is among the fundamental rights because, as the UN declaration says, it is inherent to human nature. But it is an historical fact that it was the Catholic Church that developed, over the course of the centuries, the field of natural law. And Pope Benedict XVI also upholds this in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est".
Civil society as well, Matlary emphasises, must take a greater interest in the topic of religious freedom: "Man's need for religion cannot be suppressed. Many NGO's, unfortunately, do not include the topic of religious freedom among the other human rights that they defend, like freedom of the press or of expression. All of this is a reflection of Western indifference toward religion".
In conclusion: in order for the question of religious freedom to become a concern for governments, there is a need for it to be taken up forcefully by all parties: politicians, Churches, mass media . . . "We need to win the attention of public opinion and apply pressure to the governments. An international campaign should be launched on this topic, with the involvement of opinion leaders, as has taken place for the death penalty. When there is international pressure, things change - think about apartheid in South Africa".
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