| Your View | Related Sites | Home page |
humanrightsofficer@scientology.org
FRANCE
By law, France is a secular state. There is complete separation between the church and the state, and thus no legal right exists for the state to officially recognise or not recognise any religion. The government is legally bound not to practise favouritism in its treatment of religions, and the law bans discrimination based on religion.
While this separation protects religious freedom, it is increasingly violated, most controversially in recent times by a Parliamentary Commission which identified more than 170 religious and philosophical organisations as “sects” —among them the Baptists, the religion of the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, at the time the Commission issued its report.
Having attached this label, the Commission then recommended measures be taken against these religions – measures strongly criticized by French scholars and constitutional experts as illegal and discriminatory.
The French bishops’ newspaper, La Croix, published a communique from the Office of the Secretary General of the Episcopal conference of France which concluded that the report branded the listed groups “guilty without having been heard according to the normal rule of due process.”
Italian bishops also expressed concern when Opus Dei, the conservative Catholic order, was made a target of the report. Opus Dei is favored by Pope John Paul II, who beatified the group’s founder, Josemaria Escriva de Balaquer, in 1992. Beatification is the first step to papal declaration of sainthood.
In a critique which could also have been directed at the Belgian Commission’s report mentioned earlier, eminent religious scholars including Dr. Massimo Introvigne, Director of the Center for Studies on European New Religions in Turin, and Dr. Eileen Barker of the Information Network on Religious Movements in Britain, roundly condemned the report. They wrote:
“The report of the Commission of Inquiry on Sects amounts to a broadside against hundreds of religious groups engaged in a spiritual quest and willing nothing but the best for their neighbors. With little but the unexamined accusations of anonymous ’witnesses’ it calls for a witch hunt against the innocent, an irony when one remembers the watchwords by which France likes to be known worldwide – ’liberty, equality, fraternity.’”
In France, despite extensive criticism from the academic community (which the Parliamentary Commission had completely ignored), the government was influenced by the policy of discrimination by the German government under Helmut Kohl. Hence, it adopted measures recommended by the Commission and in September 1996 created an “observatory on cults.” This gave cause for serious concern to human rights groups, especially since the Spring 1998 annual report of the Observatory to the Prime Minister urged seven unconstitutional proposals aimed at strengthening the drive to place religions under the watchful eyes of the state. Even more worryingly, the Prime Minister’s Office announced in the autumn of 1998 that the Observatory will be replaced by an ‘interministerial mission’ with greater enforcement powers. Along with the new office, a series of legislative measures have been proposed to regulate religious minorities disfavoured by the state and to authorise discriminatory legal actions against minority ideologies.
Continued...
| Previous | Glossary | Contents | Next |
| Your View | Related Sites | Home page |
humanrightsofficer@scientology.org
© 1999-2004 Church of Scientology International. All Rights Reserved.