Lance Miller, who headed the running team throughout the Journey.
ith its arrival in Belgium, the European Journey entered a country whose government is actively practicing religious discrimination in violation of the principles of the UDHR. In 1997, a parliamentary commission published a report which called for sweeping measures against no less than 189 different religions, including a number of Catholic, Protestant and Buddhist religious associations. Following the report, legal actions have been taken against a Tibetan Buddhist group, a Catholic religious congregation called “The Work” and a Japanese Shinto-based religious minority. The report also made generalized allegations that among a group of Hasidic Jews “kidnapping children does not seem to be merely occasional.”
Such unsubstantiated assertions have led to the report being severely criticised by religious scholars. It is based almost solely on the claims of apostates, whose unreliability as objective sources of information is well documented. The Belgian Parliament has nonetheless adopted a law covering the establishment of an “information centre” as well as a “coordination cell” on “dangerous sects.” The undefined and arbitrary powers available to the information centre and the coordination cell include both intelligence functions and inter-ministerial cooperation, directed against a wide range of religious minorities. Against this background, Belgian officials need to be called back to their human rights commitments under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the international human rights treaties to which Belgium is a signatory.
The European Journey provided a means for human rights-conscious officials in Belgium to criticise the drive towards religious intolerance and to demand a pledge among Parliamentarians not to jettison the core principles of the UDHR to which the Belgian government is committed.
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