LADY FOSTER:
My Lords, I thank all those who have put down their names to speak tonight on
this important but unfortunately largely ignored issue of the global persecution
of Christians. I also thank the Minister for being here to respond.
My thanks also go to all those who have contacted those listed to speak tonight
for the various briefings which have been put together. The truth is that we
probably have enough material on this issue to speak for a very long time this
evening -- the matter is an expansive one -- but we are constrained by the time limits
set and should Endeavour to respect those. In an effort to comply, I will cite
specific examples of Christian persecution to point out the trends I wish to
cover rather than try and deal with every country on the watch-list; that would
be impossible.
Whether through serendipity or divine intervention, I can think of no better
time than Holy Week to bring this issue to the attention of the House. The Bible
tells us that this was the time when Jesus suffered greatly, both physically and
mentally, knowing the death he would face on Good Friday. It therefore seems
appropriate to focus on the great suffering that continues for Christians across
the world today.
In January, along with many other MPs and Peers, I attended the launch of the
2024 Open Doors World Watch List here in Parliament. The Minister was there as
well. Every year, this organization compiles a report which sets out the 50
countries where it is most dangerous to be a Christian. This year, the research
found that more than 365 million Christians suffer high levels of persecution
and discrimination for their faith -- around one in seven Christians worldwide.
For those of us living in the United Kingdom, it can often feel as if our faith
is not respected and indeed is often belittled, even though we have an
established Church here in England and Wales. As Christians in the UK, we may
feel marginalized, but to hear that our brothers and sisters in Christ are
persecuted for their faith in the manner that was outlined was frankly shocking.
Yet very little of this persecution is spoken about, never mind acted on, and
that needs to change.
Back at Christmas in 2018, the then Bishop of Truro, now the right reverend
Prelate the Bishop of Winchester, was asked by the then Foreign Secretary,
Jeremy Hunt MP, to carry out a review into the global persecution of Christians;
to map the extent and the nature of the persecution; to assess the quality of
the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office response; and finally to
recommend changes in policy and practice to deal with the issue.
The comprehensive final report, which was published in June 2019, noted that the
problem was indeed a global phenomenon. It said that the western response to the
problem, however, was no doubt tinged by a certain post-Christian bewilderment, if not embarrassment, about
matters of faith, and a consequent failure to grasp how for the vast majority of
the world’s inhabitants faith is not only a primary marker of identity, but also
a primary motivation for action (both for good or ill).”
Religious persecution occurs to a third of the world’s population in some form,
with Christians being the most persecuted group, even though freedom of religion
and belief is a fundamental human right. To make things worse, global
persecution of Christians is underreported and therefore is not highlighted and
responded to in an adequate way. The geographical spread of anti-Christian
persecution, and its increasing severity, was noted by the Truro report. Indeed,
in some regions, the level and nature of the persecution arguably came close to
meeting the UN’s international definition of genocide.
The main impact of the persecution, apart from the individual suffering, is the
internal displacement and exodus from various parts of the world. As we come to
celebrate Easter in the Christian calendar and all the events that took place in
Jerusalem in that Holy Week, we should pay more attention and do something about
the fact that Christianity now faces being wiped out in parts of the Middle
East, where its roots go back the furthest. In the birthplace of Christ,
Christian numbers are at 1.5% of the population. Understandably we have heard
much about the plight of our Jewish friends in the region, and indeed the plight
of all those living in the region, but rarely do we hear about the tiny
Christian minority who are struggling to be heard, let alone helped. In Iraq,
the population of Christians has plummeted from 1.5 million to now just over
100,000.
Christianity, which has provided much-needed plurality in the region, is
disappearing, and apart from the tragedy which that is for those Christian
communities, it has a destabilizing impact on the Middle East. I wonder if the
Minister, who has great expertise and experience in this area, could comment on
that aspect in particular when he makes his remarks.
The Truro report said that Government need to give
“priority and specific targeted support”
to Christian communities -- this was
“not only necessary but increasingly urgent.”
Given that recommendation, perhaps the Minister could update us on any specific
action that has been taken of the back of that report, given that it is nearly
five years since its publication.
This issue of stability and security was a theme explored by the Open Doors
launch this year. The title of this year’s report was The Cost of Collapse and
the Cost of Control, and it indicated that under the cover of state fragility
and failure, violence against Christians has intensified in many parts of the
world while, elsewhere, autocratic countries increase their control.
By way of example of state fragility, as sub-Saharan Africa becomes more
unstable, religiously motivated violence is intensifying. In 18 of the 26
sub-Saharan countries, 4,606 Christians were killed because of their faith
during the 2024 reporting period. The growing violence is causing a displacement
crisis as more and more Christians are forced to flee their homes. It is of
great concern to me that this displacement of Christians is also happening in
India. More than 62,000 Indian Christians were forced to flee their homes during
the 2024 reporting period -- a huge jump from 380 in 2022 and 834 in 2023. I am
sure that His Majesty’s Government are very concerned about this and I look
forward to hearing the Minister’s observations on this region, about which we
both care deeply.
A subsection, if I may describe it as such, of the persecution of Christians is
the treatment of Christian women. Put simply, they are more likely to be the
victims of discrimination and persecution than their male counterparts. That
could be through people trafficking, gender-based violence, kidnapping, forced
marriage -- the list continues. This double marginalization of being a woman and a
Christian is underreported as women are often invisible in such societies and
poorly represented. For example, there is evidence from Pakistan of Christian
girls being groomed, trafficked into sham marriages and forced to convert to
become Muslims.
I welcome the fact that the international development White Paper commits the UK
to development policies that are inclusive of people marginalized for their
religion and belief. As I said earlier, freedom of religion and belief is a key
human right but it is sadly ignored in many parts of the world, especially in
areas of conflict. We have a proud history of promoting religious freedom in the
United Kingdom, so we should be doing more to promote it across the world.
Freedom of religion is almost a passport to securing other human rights, such as
freedom from fear, the right to family life and the right to privacy. If freedom
of religion is not protected, other rights will be overlooked and ignored as
well. We talk a lot in this House about creating foreign policies to aid
stabilization, conflict resolution and, importantly, reconciliation. Surely,
such aspects of our foreign policy must recognize the needs of religious
minorities in formulating conflict and stabilization policies.
I urge the Minister to implement the recommendations of the Truro report that
remain outstanding. In particular, I look forward to the Government establishing
the role of the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy on Freedom of Religion or Belief
in statute to add to and underline the excellent work carried out by Fiona Bruce
MP. There is also a real and urgent need to include mandatory religious literacy
in the training of all FCDO staff. This is particularly important given that, I
am sad to say, we cannot take for granted that our civil servants have a working
understanding of Christianity any more. In doing so, we need to recognize that
there is, according to the Truro report, a reluctance from some diplomats to
raise the issue of Christian persecution for fear of upsetting local
Administrations. There does not appear to be that reluctance when it comes to
other issues that may cause offence locally. Can the Minister comment on how
diplomats and staff in the Foreign Office in general can be better equipped to
deal with these complex but urgent issues?
I once again thank all noble Lords who will contribute. I hope that the UK can,
as recommended in the Truro report, take on the role of a global leader in
articulating freedom of religious belief.
LORD MOYAN:
My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Foster of
Aghadrumsee. I will offer a few reflections of my own.
When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, I felt that we had reached a point
where religious persecution had come to an end. On the whole, there was no
persecution of Christian belief, certainly in the West, so I and a lot of others
were rather surprised that, when John Paul II was elected Pope in 1978, he quite
quickly expressed the worldview that he saw the Church as still being subject to
persecution. It took some time to think that through. If you grew up in Poland,
I suppose you would see things rather differently from how I saw things growing
up somewhat later than John Paul II. If you saw the persecution of the Church by
Nazis and later under communism, you would have a very different view. Famously,
he created an astonishingly prodigious number of saints during his time as Pope,
many of them martyrs of the 20th century. I think that spoke very strongly to
him. One needs to see this in a broader sense.
While the noble Baroness spoke largely of persecution in the third world -- if one
is still correct in referring to it as the third world -- I will speak about the
persecution of Christianity in the West. The persecution that John Paul II was
familiar with growing up abated considerably as a result of the fall of the Iron
Curtain, but that does not mean it has gone away. In fact, it is present in
Europe in a new and virulent form and has spread west. We now see a very large
number of attacks on churches in western Europe, prodigiously in France but also
in Germany and Spain. We have even seen priests murdered in their churches in
France and Spain in the last few years. In Europe, 852 hate crimes were
identified in 2022 by the Vienna-based Observatory on Intolerance and
Discrimination Against Christians, with attacks on places of worship, symbols
and institutions. That represented a 44% increase. Arson attacks against
churches in Europe were up by 75% in 2022.
It is salutary to turn briefly to Canada, where in the last few years 100
churches, I believe all of them Catholic, have been torched and burned to the
ground. That arose from a story that the Catholic Church had been involved in
the past in some form of creating mass graves of native children. That led to a
considerable level of hostility, which expressed itself in these church
burnings. On closer examination, the evidence to support those claims seems to
have been greatly exaggerated at the very least. This was in Canada -- a western,
liberal country.
According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, there have been
341 incidents across 43 US states since May 2021. These are just against
Catholic churches; there are also incidents of attacks against African American
churches and Protestant churches. You can find at least a dozen such attacks on
Catholic churches on Wikipedia. The way we think about these things is quite
curious; when, in looking for this evidence, I typed into Google “Church attacks
USA”, I got back something that said, “Did you mean ‘Church attacks us’?” -- it
assumed that the Church was attacking us, rather than churches being attacked in
the USA. That shows a certain form of bias.
It is important to think about where these attacks are coming from. In France
and possibly other parts of Europe, they appear to be associated with Muslims,
often illegal immigrants or people in a state of uncertainty who are not settled
in that local society. In Canada, they appear to be associated with stories
about mass graves of native children. In the United States -- I may be touching on
a sensitive point here -- they appear to be correlated with arguments about
abortion and seem to be coming from what might be called a certain strand of
liberalism attacking the churches.
That is one of the things that concerns me very greatly, because it is something
relatively new and is a matter of considerable concern. We have been free of
that, but what starts in America ends up here. Indeed, as an aside, apart from
Brexit, I can hardly think of a single original idea that we have produced in
Britain that we have not imported from the United States in the last 30 years. I
hope it will not happen here, but we need to be wary, because these culture war
issues have clearly generated attacks in the United States, and that could come
in this direction.
Finally, we badge our international efforts on this subject under the term
“freedom of religion or belief”. That is what we advocate and that is what we
fight for, to a degree, at least -- and my noble friend the Minister is, I am sure,
going to answer the question posed by the noble Baroness, as to the extent to
which the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office does that. However, that
is what we do when we do it: we badge it as freedom of religion or belief. That
is a legal and philosophical principle. It is, in its own terms, wholly
admirable, but it is also universal and it does not reflect or recognize the
particular cultural heritage of this country, which is indeed a Christian
heritage, as evidenced by the presence of Bishops on the Benches over here.
It is possibly the wrong question, but I ask only this: is it too much that we
might see ourselves not only as international advocates of that universal
principle but as particular defenders of Christianity in the rest of the world?
Original Text Source: https://www.parallelparliament.co.uk/debate/2024-03-25/lords/lords-chamber/christians-persecution
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