I am speaking in support of this excellent motion. I generally agree with much of what my colleague has said on this and many other issues. However, today I want to take issue with something he said when speaking on behalf of another member, who was not able to be present today. I take issue with the assertion that this is one right among many.
I maintain that freedom of religion, of conscience, and of thought, including the right to be an atheist and have no religion, is a fundamental right, and all others stem from it. If we cannot believe that which seems to be the truth, which to a religious person is God's own truth, and if we cannot express that and try to convert others from what we believe are mistaken beliefs to our beliefs, then no other freedom is of any meaning. That is the foundational belief.
I have always believed that. I have a great and intense personal interest in freedom of religion and religion in general, which perhaps comes from my own background. My father was raised a Baptist. My mother was Jewish. I was raised as a Unitarian. I like to sometimes joke that I am perhaps the world's only Unitarian fundamentalist, which means that I take very seriously the idea of looking into other faiths and trying to understand what they have to say, on the theory that there is something worthwhile in all of them.
With that in mind, I have a bookshelf in my office devoted exclusively to texts on religion. I have brought some of them to the House today. I have a couple of copies of the Koran, one in verse and one in prose; a Bible; a Book of Mormon, and a whole shelf of books on Buddhism, including an excellent one entitled What the Buddha Taught, by a Theravada monk, Walpola Rahula, which, according to my notes, I read back in 1988.
My very first Standing Order 31, back in 2001 when I was first selected, was on the issue of the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners by the Chinese government. I chaired the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism in 2010-11, which included looking into our chairing an international meeting on anti-Semitism.
For five years, I have been the chair of the human rights subcommittee of the House of Commons, which gives me a chance to look at that giant smorgasbord of human rights abuses that goes on around the world. There is so much to choose from. However, by consent of all the parties, our committee has agreed to look at, among other things, rights persecutions in Burma, which are partly ethnic and partly religious; the persecution of the Copts in Egypt, on which we are just now examining a draft report; the persecution of Christians in a number of Muslim states; the persecution of Tibetan Buddhists, and one could dispute whether it is religious or national persecution, but I think it has a bit of each; the persecution of the Falun Gong; and the persecution of a variety of religious groups, including Christians, Jews, Baha'i, and other forms of Muslims in Iran, on which we have spent a bit of time.
All of this causes me to want to focus on section (b)(i) of the motion put forward by my colleague from Lambton—Kent—Middlesex
Section (b)(i) urges the Government of Canada to:
support...the opposition to laws that use “defamation of religion” and “blasphemy” both within states and internationally to persecute members of religious minorities,
I want to spend the rest of my presentation making seven points on why this is an excellent proposal and why we should be opposed to this idea.
First, based on all of the experiences I have had, it seems clear to me that religious persecution is the most pervasive and widespread form of human rights abuse worldwide. There are many other forms of abuse, such as racial, gender-based, and the abuse of sexual minorities and national minorities. However, the number one form of persecution, by far, in terms of the number of people persecuted worldwide is persecution, on the basis of religion, of those who practise a faith the state does not approve of, and more particularly, of those who try to convert others to their faith when the state does not want that to happen.
Second, all major religions and some minor religions, such as the Baha'i, face at least some persecution in some parts of the world. The only exception I can think of to this rule is Shinto, which is practised exclusively in Japan.
If our goal is to assign guilt, and this is point number three, then it is also true that advocates of all major religions are, or in the past have been, guilty of repressing others.
Atheists have been and continue to be among the world's worst oppressors of religious minorities. I draw the attention of the House to North Korea, an atheist regime, and the People's Republic of China and its oppression of Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Muslims in the Uyghur region and Falun Gong practitioners to make the point. That is probably the world's largest source of human rights abuse right there: atheism. We might want to look at Stalin's Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia and so on.
The reverse is also true, and this is very important. Members of each faith have done much to assist others to carry on their own faith. If we want to see how true that is, we should go to the Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles in Jerusalem to take a look at the people who are commemorated there. We will see members of all religions, including atheists, many Christians, some Muslims and some people who are members of none of those religions.
In a debate such as the one we are having here, I do not think there is any value in looking at it in terms of which group is being defended or which group is being attacked as we go through the discussion. It is important to understand the principle involved.
Point number five is this: religions are explanations of how the universe works. It is conceivable that every religion is wrong, but it is objectively impossible that all of them are right. How we who are involved in the system of drafting laws deal with this and with the fact that advocates of each version of the truth feel themselves morally compelled to defend their own version of the truth and to speak on its behalf is the real subject of this debate. This includes particularly how we deal with attempts to convert members of one religion to another.
To make this point, two of the books I have brought today, the Koran and the Book of Mormon, may both be wrong, but they cannot both be true. It may be the case that advocates of the one will try to convert members of the other faith. They may feel themselves compelled to try to convert members of the other faith to theirs, even see it as their highest moral duty. They cannot do so without saying, “The faith you currently hold is false to the extent that it is inconsistent with the faith that I hold”. It is impossible for them to do that.
However, the United Nations Human Rights Council looked at making that illegal and tried to incorporate into international law a forbidding of engaging in that kind of fulfilment of one's own moral duty.
On March 27, 2008, UNHRC passed a resolution—which was not endorsed by Canada, I should emphasize—that stated as point 12 that “...everyone has the right to freedom of expression, and...the exercise of this right carries with it special duties and responsibilities, and may therefore be subject to certain restrictions, but only those provided by law and necessary for the respect of the rights or reputations of others...”, by which it means other religions.
“The rights or reputations of others” means not saying another individual's religion is false to the extent it is inconsistent with one's own religion. That means the jailing, in some cases perhaps even execution, of people who are merely expressing their own religion as they believe they are compelled by God's law to do, and the authorization of that oppression by international law. That is what Canada must take a stand against.
I feel that way. I hope the entire House feels that way. I will point out that if so, we will not be alone. In 2009, another resolution of a similar nature was condemned by more than 200 civil society organization from 46 countries, including members of Muslim, Christian, Jewish, secular, humanist and atheist groups, and similar condemnations have continued since that time.
I will make a final point. If anyone believes that their belief system is the absolute truth, whether it is their religion or whether they are atheists who believe that all religions are false, then they must, by necessity, also believe that in a free marketplace of ideas, their views will prevail in the end. If a person believes that their views will prevail in the end because they are the views expressed by God himself or because the person believes they are a logical conclusion of reason, then the person must believe that there is no need to oppress others. Indeed, it is counterproductive.
On that basis, I encourage all members to vote for this motion.