India: Freedom of Religion or Belief

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 16th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton (Con)]

I can certainly give the right reverend Prelate that confirmation. I very much agree with the Bill. In fact, I insisted that it went forward with government support. Fiona Bruce does an excellent job in this regard and, for the first time, one of these governmental envoys will be placed on a statutory footing. That reflects the importance that we in this Government and in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office attach to celebrating freedom of religious belief. She does a great job and should be able to do it on a statutory basis.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, will the noble Lord build on the success of his department at the 2022 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in managing to include in communiqué the words,

“freedom of religion or belief are cornerstones of democratic societies”,

and will he encourage his officials on two things? The first is to emphasise that this is not exceptionalism and that Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—that everyone has the right to believe, not to believe or to change their belief—is about every human being’s right. Secondly, there is empirical evidence that shows that those countries which promote freedom of religion or belief are the most prosperous and most stable in the world. If we look at factors such as the 114 million displaced people in the world, we see that they are often in countries where there is not such freedom.

[Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton (Con)]

The noble Lord speaks with great passion and knowledge about this. My department takes this very seriously: not only have we set up the envoy and are putting that into legislation but we have dedicated staff in the FCDO who look at freedom of religious belief. My noble friend Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon led at the United Nations Security Council in June, together with UAE, in defence of a motion on freedom of religious belief. Of course, in response to the report by the right reverend Prelate when he was the Bishop of Truro, we commemorate Red Wednesday—I want to reassure my noble friends that this is not a political moment; it is a moment when we celebrate and make clear how important it is that people have freedom of religious belief, and how we stand up for those being persecuted for their beliefs. I think that on the last occasion of Red Wednesday, we lit up the FCDO in red—something which, in other circumstances, I hope is not going to happen any time soon.