Archbishop Urges U.N. to Fight Discrimination
GENEVA, SEPT. 18, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Religious freedom can serve as a bridge linked to other rights, said the head of the Holy See's permanent observer mission to the U.N. offices in Geneva.
Archbishop Silvano Tomasi affirmed this in his address to the sixth special session of the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, under way through Sept. 28.
The prelate said, "There is a widely felt perception that the international community is confronted with the difficult task of balancing freedom of religion, freedom of expression, respect of religious and non-religious beliefs and convictions, defamation of religion and members of a religion."
Yet, he explained, "religious freedom can serve as an element of synthesis, as a bridge, among the diverse categories of human rights."
The 66-year-old prelate added: "The profession of a religion in public or in private is, in fact, a freedom that belongs not only to the field of civil and political rights -- and therefore is linked to the freedom of thought, expression and worship -- but also to that of economic, social and cultural rights."
This link is seen, he said, "in the possibility of religions' auto-organization, in the charitable action of the individual members of the communities of faith and in the forms of solidarity carried out by religious institutions in the sectors of health, education and formation."
"The presence and influence of the world’s great religions was often a way to go beyond the subjective limits of the positivist juridical order with objective moral norms that serve the common good of all humanity," Archbishop Tomasi added.
A guarantee
Recognizing that religious freedom guarantees the interrelation among the various fundamental rights means that "public powers must work so that the profession of a religion must not limit the civil rights or the political or institutional participation, nor must it be used to deny economic, social and cultural rights to individuals or communities," the Vatican official said.
He added: "The principles and rules for the defense of fundamental human rights, that also through the action of the Council for Human Rights, and its efforts to propose just procedures and mechanisms, are in a process of consolidation as patrimony of the international community and of various countries, show that there is no contrast between religious freedom and freedom of expression: Both belong to those intellectual faculties of the human person, to his action in the public and private sphere."
Thus, the council is challenged to "consider the requests that cry out to regulate the religious phenomenon faced with cases of discrimination and true defamation of religions and members of a religion," the archbishop affirmed.
These requests, he said, "prove that international action, together with the internal initiatives of states, is called to guarantee a just balance in the exercise of these two rights, recognizing that the freedom of expressing a religious creed, when authentic, assumes a public function: It contributes to social cohesion and therefore to the peaceful living together of all people, minorities and majority, believers and nonbelievers, within the same country."
The archbishop concluded that the appropriate social and political context within which to promote and protect all human rights, "including the profession of a religion or changing or rejecting it, implies the acceptance that human rights are interrelated and that international standards should be translated into judicial and legal national provisions for the equal benefit, protection and freedom of every person."
ZE07091805 - 2007-09-18