Beginning in southern England in June 1998, a team of marathon runners crossed Holland, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Italy and Austria, finally entering Germany where thousands attended a religious freedom rally in Frankfurt on August 10. Coordinated and organised by the Church of Scientology, the project was supported by Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, Hindu and other religious communities.
There has never been more need to know, demand and defend human rights. Europe is the world’s greatest concentration of democracies. Unless the governments of powerful nations such as France and Germany lead by example, the governments of third world nations will ignore calls to raise their human rights standards.
Currently, a few European governments are retreating from the principles of the UDHR and descending into authoritarianism. Several have authorised parliamentary commissions into religious matters, passed or proposed discriminatory laws and introduced arbitrary restrictions to marginalise religious minorities.
These government measures enjoy little popular support and the arguments used to justify them are discredited by scholarly evidence. By a manufacture of a moral panic about minority religions, vested interests are seeking to break down the protective structure insulating religious practice from government interference—the structure that safeguards against state-sanctioned religious persecution.
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