Freedom of Religion and Belief

Fiona Bruce Excerpts

Tuesday 19th September 2023 Westminster Hall

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered freedom of religion and belief.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allowing time for this debate. Speaking as a Member of Parliament, I seek to bring to bear my experiences over the last two to three years as the UK Prime Minister’s special envoy for freedom of religion or belief, and from my role as the chair of the International Religious Freedom or Belief Alliance, which now comprises 42 countries and growing, even though it is only just over three years old.

The focus of my speech is the need for us to be bolder and braver, to turn more of our words into actions, and to make a positive difference for those who suffer freedom of religion or belief violations. Freedom of religion or belief is a foundational right, but sadly violations of it are increasing across the world, by countries at scale, by terror groups and mobs, and through abuses against individuals imprisoned for their beliefs who so boldly and bravely stand and suffer for their faith. Those people are excluded from education, jobs, healthcare and access to justice; they experience discrimination, harassment and persecution. They are at risk of being incarcerated, tortured or even killed simply on account of what they believe. The men, women and children around the world who suffer, whether under the hard arm of authoritarian regimes or at the ruthless whims of militant mobs, need not just our voices, but our partnership—not just our words, but our good deeds.

That is why, after the London ministerial last July on freedom of religion or belief—a two-day gathering, which I had the privilege of co-chairing with Lord Ahmad, that was attended by more than 1,000 Government representative delegates from more than 80 countries, with more than 130 side events at the FORB fringe— I said, “These two days cannot be just a talking shop. We must turn our words into action that follows.” My special envoy team and I organised a third day after the conference; I pay tribute to David Burrowes, my deputy special envoy, and my private secretary from the Foreign Office, Sue Breeze.

That event was a “next steps” day, when more than 100 people from across the international community concerned about freedom of religion or belief, or FORB, sat down and worked out some action priorities, which the special envoy team has since worked to implement. In some cases they have begun to be implemented and in others we have made some good progress, with the support of the global council of experts of the International Religious Freedom or Belief Alliance—a group of 40 experts from across the world—and in conjunction with representatives of the UK FORB Forum, a forum of 70 concerned organisations chaired by Mervyn Thomas, the founder of CSW, who is in the Gallery today.

I will particularly focus on strengthening collaborative working on freedom of religion or belief between grassroots activists, academics, lawyers, civil society experts, faith leaders, non-governmental organisations and Government representatives such as myself. Not long ago, it was encouraging to hear Mervyn Thomas, a seasoned observer in this field, say that he has never seen the FORB community more connected than it is today. We will make a difference only if we work together. The International Religious Freedom or Belief Alliance is a growing organisation. Our countries range from the Americas, Canada, Brazil, Costa Rica and across Africa, such as in Sierra Leone, down to Australia and through to many European countries. We are an organisation based on action.

What are the practical next steps that have been taken since the London ministerial last July? IRFBA—a difficult acronym to say—has inspired a 24-hour global virtual youth conference on FORB. This will take place on 19 and 20 October, and we hope to engage 1,000 young people from across the world, including in countries where they experience persecution, to enable them to directly recount their experiences through the “open space” format. We hope to inspire a new generation of FORB ambassadors. Much as young people have inspired the world on climate change, can I encourage anyone listening to this debate to log on to forbsfuture.org, and find out more about this conference? Particularly if you are a young person, please join it.

Other work has been done for young people. For instance, throughout the last academic year since the London ministerial, curriculum materials have been developed for the very youngest children—five and upwards—to understand the importance of not discriminating against others on account of their religion or belief, with a pilot being undertaken in four schools in the UK, including one in my constituency. Preliminary feedback is encouraging —children as young as five can quickly grasp the concept of FORB—and I have been encouraged by the interest in this work shown by our Schools Minister. I hope we can roll it out to more schools nationwide, and internationally across to our IRFBA countries in due course. I call this the ultimate upstream prevention work.

The special envoy team, together with the International Religious Freedom or Belief Alliance, is driving forward work in a number of other areas. Time prohibits me from going into detail, but let me list them. We are championing individual prisoners of conscience—at least one a month over the last year—and we have already seen two people imprisoned for their beliefs released. The most recent is young Hanna Abdimalik from Somaliland, a 24-year-old who converted to Christianity, was reported to the authorities by her own mother and was imprisoned for five years. I am very pleased to say that she was released last month.

We are building an international network of FORB roundtables, such as the UK FORB Forum, which has been so successful. We are networking and supporting human rights defenders working on FORB. We are better engaging with the media on FORB. This is a struggle, but we are doing our best to look at how we can better bring this major international concern into the media, both social and mainstream. We are working on atrocity prevention to help to call out abuses earlier. We are working with lawyers on legislative reform. We are looking to protect religious and cultural heritage with a very active working group, and we are beginning to network on international best practice for trauma counselling and rehabilitation, so that people such as young Hanna can get appropriate support when they are released from prison. This is the kind of work I mean when I say that we need to turn words into action.

That is the good news; and why is it so important? Because of the bad news. The bad news is that it has never been more important to champion FORB because it has never been more at risk. What is the evidence? Look across the world at what has happened in the over two and a half years since I was appointed as the UK Prime Minister’s special envoy for freedom of religion or belief in December 2020. We have seen a military coup in Myanmar dramatically exacerbating the persecution of religious minorities there. We have seen the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, with every belief group there, other than those willing to succumb to the Taliban’s oppressive ways, now living in daily fear. Eritrea and Uganda have grown increasingly authoritarian.

FORB restrictions have increased in Tunisia, as well as in Algeria, to which I led a delegation just a few months ago. In Algeria, dozens—indeed, most—of the evangelical Protestant churches have been required to close in the last few years. Pastors now face court proceedings. The Catholic social action charity Caritas was shut down—actually, while I was there—a few months ago. Ahmadi Muslims face huge fines. Not one synagogue is left open in the capital, Algiers, and Bible Society literature has been blockaded from distribution from ships at port. Also in Africa, in Nigeria, year on year increasing thousands of Christians are massacred by the ISWA—Islamic State West Africa—terrorist network.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Member and all the other Members who engage on this important issue on an ongoing basis. She is outlining a whole series of international incidents and issues. Does she agree that there must be an international response to all this, to ensure that there is wider understanding and then action taken, as she has outlined?

[Fiona Bruce]

The hon. Member is absolutely right. I am pleased that the international response through the International Religious Freedom or Belief Alliance is strengthening, but we need to do more and we need more countries to join it.

In Nicaragua, the Catholic Church has been targeted this year, with religious organisations running schools and medical centres peremptorily expelled. A university was shut down last month. Even Mother Teresa’s nuns, who have been working there for 30 years, were thrown out with no notice. Meanwhile, dozens of pastors flee Cuba. We are all too aware of China’s incarceration of 1 million or more Uyghurs, but how many of us know that a similar number of children—1 million or so—as young as two years old have recently been removed from their homes and families in Tibet and transported to residential schools, to alienate them from their families, cultures and beliefs? In Hong Kong, the public voice of the Church has been neutered.

In the period since I was privileged to take up the office of envoy, the war against Ukraine has erupted, with places of worship being deliberately destroyed, pastors disappearing and Putin weaponising Orthodox Christianity. In Russia itself, Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are pacifists, are now being imprisoned as criminals—even the very elderly.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend’s amazing work as the United Kingdom’s envoy. With regard to Ukraine and Russia and the point made by the hon. Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell)—who is to my right in this Chamber but not to my right politically—the United Kingdom has imposed the toughest sanctions possible to address Putin’s war machine and hold him accountable. The question was raised about the international community coming together to address and to hold to account those who violate religious freedom. Will the envoy say whether the 42 member countries of the alliance—I declare that I was its vice-chair—have come together to ask respective countries to look at sanctioning certain individuals across the globe for their violations of international religious freedom or belief?

[Fiona Bruce]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. As chair of the alliance, I have certainly asked our sanctions unit to look at individuals, but it is an excellent point: the alliance collectively could also look at that.

Ukraine is a founder member of IRFBA, but Ukraine and many central European countries around it now face Putin crouching at their door. For them, defending FORB is more than a principle; it is a lived reality. They faced communism, they faced the Nazis. Working with my counterparts from those countries humbles me. I am referring to counterparts such as Ambassador Robert Řehák from the Czech Republic, the IRFBA vice-chair. When he was at school during the communist era in what became the Czech Republic, the state police came to see him and said, “If you keep speaking out like this, we’ll take you away.” He says, “I knew they meant it, because I had seen the bodies taken away through the streets of Prague in black bags.”

All the FORB violations that I have referred to and more, in all the countries where FORB violations have increased, are impacting on millions of people across the world. It is a tragedy that so many violations are happening in our time and that the numbers of people affected are so huge. Individual men, women and children are affected. They are suffering simply because of what they believe and simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But there are too many wrong places and this is in our time, the 21st century.

It is a tragic paradox that globalisation, which not long ago, in the 20th century, was heralded as the route to a more connected, confident and civilised future for the world, seems to have spawned, in the 21st century, a far more insecure, fractious and fragmented international landscape. The current global trajectory is away from a rights-based order or consensus, prioritising democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law, to what could increasingly be described as a values-based order—and those values are not always positive, focusing on national, religious, ethnic or political priorities.

Since the turn of the century, an increasing number of countries have seen the creeping eclipse of liberal democracy and its replacement by an authoritarianism led by so-called democracies such as Russia and inspired by the model of the People’s Republic of China. A new authoritarian influence that openly seeks to reinterpret and redefine human rights is on the increase, aided and abetted by technological developments, facilitating persecution on a scale unimaginable a generation ago. That technology, which is sold around the world to dozens of countries, also feeds another recent trend: transnational repression. Consequently, it often appears, as the writer Anne Applebaum so powerfully noted in The Atlantic, that “The Bad Guys Are Winning”—a piece she otherwise titled, “The Autocrats Are Winning”.

For authoritarians, FORB represents an existential threat. For states and rulers who seek to impose their worldview or ideology and who wish to control the national narrative, the public presence of diverse and vocal religious and belief groups is intolerable. For them, ultimate loyalty must be to an authoritarian leader and no other. That, of course, is no more tragically seen than in the outworking of the egregiously cruel regime of Kim Jong-un in North Korea, where three generations of a family can be punished for the so-called crime of one, and where a two-year-old child has been sentenced to life in prison simply because his parents owned a Bible.

As well as the autocrats—the so-called bad guys—regrettably, too many Governments, which may be called “the good guys”, view FORB merely as a niche interest, to be engaged by a few of us with a particularly religious perspective on life. Yet FORB is not a niche topic or a sidebar issue. That perception has to change. Here in the UK, we cannot just tick the FORB box by saying, “Well, there’s a special envoy.” The so-called good guys have to be bolder and braver to call out FORB abusers, and those of us involved in this work need to work harder to communicate that.

FORB is a foundational human right. FORB concerns should therefore be core concerns at every international summit, because they are at the core of so many human rights violations today. I will give just one of the many examples of continuing blind spots in identifying FORB abusers for what they are—and this one is by the good guys. While women in Iran have bravely led the charge against the brutal theocratic regime, journalists and politicians alike have not fully grasped the fact that, at heart, the protests are about FORB violations. The imposition of religious dress codes is a FORB issue. It is FORB that the Iranian regime fears most because, as with all authoritarian regimes, FORB represents an existential threat. With angry crowds shouting, “Women, life, freedom,” it is the realisation of FORB in full that will ensure respect for women, for life and for freedom for everyone in Iran. This is the issue on which the future of Iran hangs.

If global trends continue, the stage is set for an era of diminishing human rights. FORB will continue to be a prime casualty of that decline, which will be exacerbated by inadequate understanding—even by the good guy countries—of FORB as a foundational human right and of its importance in the human rights realm. We have been too accustomed to countries merely paying lip service to FORB rights and obligations, having signed up to international agreements including article 18 of the universal declaration of human rights and the international covenant on civil and political rights, but without honouring the obligations in them. In a country that has signed up to both those agreements, it is simply not acceptable for a young girl to be kidnapped from her home, forcibly “married” by being raped multiple times, and then turned away when she goes to a police station or tries to get justice through the courts. We should call this out more.

If the era that I have described continues, we can expect even the pretence of assent to begin to fade. That is why the good guys must be bolder and braver. Although human rights are independently valuable and interdependent, the right to FORB is a foundational value. Without the freedom to believe or not to believe, it is hard to see how other human rights make sense. Freedom of speech, freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom of movement, freedom of expression, the right to equality before the law, the right to education, privacy, family life and marriage—all those rights are predicated and contingent on the right to thought, conscience and religion.

Citizens cannot be truly free if they cannot live according to their beliefs. Without the expression of what has long been considered a sacred inner liberty, external rights lack grounding and legitimacy. Political, social and economic freedoms cannot co-exist alongside major limitations on FORB. FORB can exist without democracy, but it is hard to see how democracy can exist without FORB. FORB can also be considered a foundational value, because violations of it provide an early warning system for other human rights troubles and their trajectory. That is why we need to call out abuses at an early stage.

Much good work is being done, as I mentioned at the outset, but we need to do still more to be bolder and braver and to turn more of our words into action. We need a dedicated Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office Minister in the House of Commons working on the issue of religion or belief. I am grateful to the Minister for being here today, and I know she takes great interest in the subject, but last week it was the Minister for Europe, my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Leo Docherty), who responded to our debate on the Ahmadis. During Question Time in the main Chamber, it is the Minister responsible for international development, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), who answers questions on FORB. This is too important an issue for us not to have a dedicated Minister in the House of Commons, much as we have one for women and girls. On every foreign trip, a Minister should be accompanied by a FORB briefing, which my special envoy team is more than willing to provide. We also need to ensure that recommendation 6 of the Truro review—that the special envoy role be embedded in legislation—is put into effect.

On 18 October, I shall present a private Member’s Bill on the issue. I thank hon. Members who are supporting the Bill, and I pay tribute to parliamentary colleagues across the parties for their commitment to and interest in FORB. We in the UK are a beacon in that respect, but we need to ensure that the energy and momentum of the current special envoy team endure beyond the next general election and that they are given better and more adequate and substantive departmental support in the FCDO. This is an area in which the UK is now seen as a global leader. Let us keep it that way.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Fiona Bruce]

I thank all colleagues for contributing so excellently and informedly today, and I thank the Minister for her thoughtful response. Forgive me if I do not refer to all colleagues individually, but I want to mention the reference made by the hon. Member for Newport West (Ruth Jones) to the need for a “better world” and the potential of religions to play a role in achieving that. Would it not be wonderful if we could move from a narrative of attitudes to religion being the cause of so many problems in the world to one of freedom of religion or belief being one of the answers to the world’s problems, as I believe it is?

To illustrate that, I close by presenting colleagues with two alternative futures for our consideration. The first is a world in which freedom of religion or belief is weak. Here there is an unbridled appetite for power. Domination is the goal. The strong succeed. The vulnerable are violated—physically, mentally, emotionally. Fear prevails. Minorities are despised, diversity deterred, assimilation enforced. Lives are wasted, as people are seen as a disposable means to an ideological end.

The second possible future is a world in which freedom of religion or belief is strong and respected. Here, people find ways to live together with their deepest differences. Choices for FORB can be freely made, and so many other freedoms flow from that foundational right: individual potential can flourish, safety and security are enhanced in local communities and internationally, the weak are strengthened and supported, poverty and inequality are reduced, minorities are respected, diversity is honoured, voices are given an opportunity to speak, and lives are fulfilled. Every person is afforded the inherent human dignity that is their due.

The choice between those two possible futures lies before us. Much depends on those of us in this room today.

[Hon. Members]

Hear, hear.