By Jean-Paul Marthoz

On 17 September, while the media planet was awash with the controversy triggered by Pope Benedict XVI’s speech in Ratisbonne, thousands of people – Christians, Jews, Muslims, and non-believers – gathered in dozens of cities around the world to denounce the massacres of civilians in Darfur. That same day, the Archbishop of Canterbury, South African Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu, Sheikh Ibrahim Mogra (Chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain’s Interfaith Relations Committee), and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (Director of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth) adhered to the same message of peace.
Religious organisations have been at the heart of the movement for Darfur. The Save Darfur Coalition in the United States includes more than a hundred faith-based organisations, including the American Jewish World Service, Catholic Episcopal Conference, World Hindu Council of America, and National Association of Evangelicals. This ecumenism recalls other major mobilisations launched by religious organisation. The campaign against the slave trade and slavery, the denunciation of the exactions committed in the Free State of the Congo in Leopold II’s time, and the defence of the Armenians during the 1915 genocide in the Ottoman Empire were all marked by the pre-eminent roles played by churches. More recently, the fight against racial segregation in the United States, anti-apartheid campaign in South Africa, and campaigns against Latin American military regimes gave illustrious examples of the various churches and believers’ commitment to human rights. The names of Reverend Martin Luther King and Dom Helder Camara, Bishop of Recife, can be found in the human rights movement’s pantheon. “The Catholics and Protestants were also for a long time practically the only ones to take up the matter of migrants’ and refugees’ rights,” Mariette Grange, Director of HRW’s Geneva office and former World Council of Churches officer, points out.

Differences
Does that mean that everyone is pulling together in perfect harmony? No! Despite the broad consensus on Darfur and a history of joint mobilisation, there are real differences within the human rights community over issues that involve religious convictions or institutions, and these differences are even tending to multiply.
At first glance, the major non-denominational organisations are handling the “religious issue” serenely. Some of them have placed this subject outside their jurisdiction so as not to compromise their main goals. This is the case of the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories B’Tselem, for example. “Matters of religion have never hobbled our action,” the former director of the NGO and current director of the Center for Economic and Social Rights, Eitan Felner, explains, “to the extent even that the organisation had set itself a strict mandate.” Others, on the contrary, have included religious freedom within their scopes. The US organisation Human Rights Watch has thus published numerous reports on violations of religious freedom over the past years and defended minorities that were attacked or discriminated against because of their beliefs, such as Christians in India, independent Muslims in Uzbekistan, and Jehovah’s Witnesses in Georgia. Amnesty International has done so, too. Amnesty International USA’s Internet site proposes an “interfaith activism” page that calls attention to faith-based communities’ long-standing involvement in human rights work and the fact that members of all the world’s major religions support AI. The organisation even proposes specific actions for believers. So, in September 2006 it asked Muslims to participate in a “Ramadan Action for Human Rights” and to seize that particular moment of reflection to write letters in favour of releasing prisoners of conscience the world over.

Ideology
Nevertheless, relations have not always been easy. In the 1970s and 1980s the tensions concerned first of all the religious groups themselves. The defence of human rights was not shouldered by everyone: In South Africa, Desmond Tutu was opposed by the Dutch Reformed Church, which supported the National Party and apartheid; in Latin America, some Roman Catholic bishops and evangelical pastors blessed the military regimes whereas others, following the examples of Monsignor Oscar Romero in El Salvador and Mgr Silvio Hernandez in Chile, defended their victims.
At that time, the division was an ideological one tied to political jockeying. It pitted the members of Opus Dei against the proponents of liberation theology within the Catholic Church and a progressive wing, led by Jim Wallis and the Sojourners, for one, against the ultraconservatives of the Christian Coalition within the evangelical movement. Today, in contrast, the clouds that are gathering over the human rights community and sometimes darkening its wish for unity are generated less by ideology than by its relationship with religiousness, and above all by the “religious comeback”. Even though highly secular Europe seems to be the exception, religion is occupying a growing place in political and social life in many countries and consequently setting the human rights movement’s framework for intervention.
In the 1990s, it was relatively easy to deal with the “religious factor”, for it was part and parcel of forms of political extremism and violence in the Balkans, Northern Ireland, and Algeria that were decried by the most eminent figures of the major religions. So, in 2003 a UNESCO conference in Barcelona brought together the highest authorities of Sunni Islam, the Dalai Lama, rabbis, and Jesuits to assert their religions’ contributions to the culture of peace. The denunciation of “terrorism committed in the name of God” did not brook appeal. In recent years, however, other stakes affecting the place of religion in the public area, freedom of expression, and major ethical issues (birth control, AIDS prevention, homosexuals’ rights, etc.) have made loud entrances into the human rights movements’ debates. As a result, the movement has found itself torn between its secular and religious members.
One nuance, however, must not be overlooked: The divides exist within religions as much as between secular activists and believers. Tensions can run very high and diametrically opposing positions can be adopted within a given church. The Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu worlds are sundered by the rifts between fundamentalists, traditionalists, centrists, and progressives. “In Washington, DC, you find ‘liberal’ Protestant lobbyists who disagree with the evangelicals and fundamentalists on practically every controversial public issue. The Catholics, for their part, align themselves with one or the other group depending on the subject,” Allen D. Hertzke, who is Director of Religious Studies at Oklahoma University and the author of an authoritative book on evangelicals and human rights, explains.
These differences are particularly visible in the United States because of the weight of religion in political debate. Opposite the Roman Catholic Church of America and the majority of evangelicals who oppose abortion or the gay lobby’s demands, a score of organisations linked to eighteen “communities of faith” banded together between 1995 and 2005 in an Interfaith Working Group to defend homosexuals and the separation between Church and State. Catholics for a Free Choice, led by the Catholic feminist Frances Kissling, brings the contradiction inside the Roman Catholic Church in the United States and Latin America, where controversy over contraception is particularly strong.

Face-off
Non-denominational organisations and religious institutions have found each other in opposing trenches a number of times in the past few years. Human Rights Watch, for example, has published a report criticising the Roman Catholic Church of the Philippines, which is accused of hampering sexual education and thus jeopardising the campaign to prevent the spread of AIDS. It also took on representatives of Islam by defending the right to blasphemy and freedom of expression during the Danish cartoons controversy. Finally, it has irritated Hindu authorities by investigating the persecution of Christians in India.
The debate over the status of homosexuals has been especially polemical. Philippe Hensmans, Director of the French-speaking chapter of AI-Belgium, recalls that during Amnesty International’s International Council the organisation had decided to recognise people who were incarcerated because of their sexual orientation as prisoners of opinion. The discussions were extremely heated and reflected a split between the countries of the North and a few Latin American countries in one camp and Africa and Asia in the other.
These disagreements subsist and suspicion remains rampant. Religious groups hesitate when faced with organisations that contest fundamental tenets of their doctrines and are now expressing quite clearly their will to regain ground lost to what they denounce as the “empire of secularism”. Convergences have also developed between Christianity and Islam at major international conferences and, in particular, UN summits on population and AIDS, in order to thwart the non-denominational organisations and their “secular agenda”.
Referring to their principles, too, the “neutral” NGOs are retaliating by, for example, accusing the evangelical churches of defending fellow evangelicals preferentially, in contradiction to the impartial, universal commitment of human rights. They sometimes even accuse religions, or at least some of the interpretations of their messages, to be at the root of human rights violations. This includes criticism levelled at Muslims concerning women’s status, the crime of apostasy, the enforcement of certain provisions of Koranic law, and religious discrimination. The conservative evangelicals are accused of wanting to backtrack on achievements such as the decriminalisation of abortion and non-discrimination against homosexuals and promoting a veritable crusade against Islam.

Freedoms and secularity
The differences that may pit “neutral” NGOs against religious representatives do not for all that mean that the fight for human rights as expressed by oganisations such as HRW and AI is synonymous with secularity. They illustrate the changes in the paradigm that the human rights doctrine has gradually introduced into cultural, philosophical, and societal debate by extending its brief to include ethical subjects that are by their very nature more controversial.
In recent years, non-denominational humanrights organisations have upon a number of occasions opposed partisans of secularity in certain countries, such as France, who express an important current of the movement, notably through the League of Human Rights. So, in 2003, during the debate on wearing “ostentatious” or “visible” religious symbols in France’s public schools, AI and HRW spoke out against the law banning the head scarf and thus against secular associations with which they have excellent relations on most other issues. This choice was predicated not on the principle of secularity, but on the principles of religious freedom and freedom of conscience. Following this same logic, both organisations oppose the compulsory wearing head scarves that is decreed in Muslim countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Is the tendency one of accommodation or confrontation? The answer could differ with the country, due to the various players’ activism or the society’s degree of secularity. There will inevitably be intangible front lines against violence, for example, or discrimination. There will be other, more fluctuating, front lines when the debates concern issues of personal ethics. Common ground will also emerge: Some non-denominational organisations currently acknowledge that religious groups have highlighted subjects that they themselves had relatively neglected. These include not just the fight against religious oppression, be it in China, North Korea, Sudan, or Saudi Arabia, but also the fight against sexual exploitation and slavery. In this regard, “secular” NGOs have also taken stock of religious organisations’ abilities to mobilise, especially those of American evangelical groups. The latter, who depend less on having access to the major media, have developed powerful “grass roots” networks and converted this influence into electoral power. So, the denunciation of trafficking in human beings that groups such as Human Rights Watch and various feminist associations issued in the early 1990s took on a completely new dimension when the churches mobilised around this issue, culminating in the U.S. Congress’s passing a law to apply sanctions on States guilty of complicity in such traffficking.
In a world marked by brutal human irghts violations but also uncertainty and disagreement over issues of ethics and “meaning”, the dialogue between all human rights organisations, denominational and non-denominational alike, appears to be more necessary than ever. Beyond “partisan” solidarities and allegiances, humankind and its integrity should be a stronger unifying force than dogma of whatever persuasion.