Jaswant Singh Khalra was remembered at the Human Rights Council
Sep 29 2020
Jaswant Singh Khalra was remembered at the Human Rights Council
Jaswant Singh Khalra HRC 45

On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the death of Jaswant Singh Kharla CAP Freedom of Conscience, United Sikhs, Khalra Mission Organization and the author of the book The Valiant – Jaswant Singh Khalra  Gurmeet Kaur made a statement to the UN during the 45th session of the Human Rights Council.

According to the president of CAP LC,

“it is time for the truth to be revealed and for the families of the victims to know the truth about the fate of their loved one” and continued saying that “it is the duty of the Indian authorities to shed light on this crime against humanity”. (Their full statement can be seen here)

Jaswant Singh Kharla’s crime is to have uncovered, according to his book

“thousands of state-enforced disappearances, illegal detentions, custodial killings, and mass cremations of the Sikhs under government’s orders, which constitute the Sikh genocide”.

After its discovery Jaswant Singh Kharla  took as his mission to stop the “government’s tyranny” by exposing and “holding it accountable through legal means”. 

On January 16, 1995, he made public evidence of 3,100 illegal cremations of disappeared persons in just three crematoria from one out of the then thirteen districts in Punjab. He estimated there were a total of 25,000 cremations of disappeared persons throughout the state.

On September 6, 1995, Jaswant Singh Khalra  himself was abducted in broad daylight, tortured in illegal custody for 52 days before being shot dead; his body dismembered and dumped into the very canal that was used to dispose other bodies that he had set out to find.

Author Gurmeet Kaur who wrote The Valiant – Jaswant Singh Khalra said:

“Twenty-five years later, we hope the government will not obstruct efforts to document the gravity of the state-sponsored genocide before nature takes its course and the aging witnesses and parents of the disappeared die”.

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‘In Prison for Their Faith 2020’, a new report mapping prisoners worldwide from 13 religious groups
Sep 28 2020
‘In Prison for Their Faith 2020’, a new report mapping prisoners worldwide from 13 religious groups

by Human Rights Without Frontiers International

Muslims and half a million Tibetan Buddhists (*) in so-called ‘re-education camps’, thousands of members of the Church of Almighty God, and thousands of Falun Gong practitioners in detention for years, China is the worst violator of religious freedom in the world. These groups comprise of the majority of individuals in prison worldwide for the legitimate exercise of their religious freedom, according to HRWF’s latest report titled “In Prison for Their Faith 2020” (213 pages) released online and in print on 28 September.

Uyghur Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists have been massively incarcerated without committing any crimes and without any official charges. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) claims they are detained for the purpose of being ‘reeducated’, and pushes the state-sanctioned Marxist-Leninist ideology with the obvious objective to supersede Islam.

Thousands of members of The Church of Almighty God, which is the most rapidly expanding new religious movement in China, as well as Falun Gong practitioners have been arrested, tortured and incarcerated. Most of their sentences are between three and seven years, but some are serving 10 years or more.

Among Christians of all faiths, Protestants were the most numerous in prison, mainly for being denied registration and the ensuing right to operate, such as in Eritrea, Vietnam and China; for being accused of blasphemy, such as in Pakistan; or for converting Muslims, such as in Iran.   Besides Uyghur Sunni Muslims in China, all other Muslim prisoners (Sunnis, Tabligh Jamaat, Said Nursi followers, Sufis, and Shias) were sentenced to heavy terms despite being in Muslim-majority countries such as Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

More than 50 Jehovah’s Witnesses were indefinitely detained in atrocious conditions in Eritrea for being conscientious objectors to military service, some since 1994, or for the peaceful exercise of their religious freedom. In Russia, the group was banned in April 2017 on charges of extremism and over 30 individuals were sentenced to heavy prison terms for exercising their freedom of worship and assembly, even in private. In Singapore and Turkmenistan, they were incarcerated as conscientious objectors.

For years, Baha’is have been systematically arrested and imprisoned in Iran. The charges against them are typically: forming an illegal cult, acting against national security, espionage, propaganda against the regime, posing a  threat to the regime by sharing  Baha’i ideas with Israel, plotting to overthrow the regime, membership in an anti-Islamic group, membership in illegal groups and assemblies, and jeopardizing the security of the country to further the aims of the Baha’is and international organizations.  

An unknown number of Tibetan Buddhists were arrested for the mere practice of their religion in China, while nearly 30 of An Dan Dai Dao and Hoa Hao Buddhists were serving long periods of detention in Vietnam.   HRWF’s report “In Prison for Their Faith 2020” also covers Ahmadis in Pakistan. All of them at the time of writing this report has been victims of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, which are used and abused to serve as an outlet for pervasive anti-Ahmadi hostility as well as to settle private disputes.

The report “In Prison for Their Faith 2020” has identified a number of religious groups whose members or followers have purposefully been put in prison either for their religious identity or for the legitimate exercise of religious freedom which includes: the freedom to have or not have a religion, to change or retain one’s religion or beliefs; the freedom of expression on religious issues; the freedom of association; the freedom of worship or assembly; and conscientious objection to military service.

Each section is devoted to a specific religion or religious group and is structured as follows: an introduction about the religious denomination, the teachings, and country-specific data such as the reasons for the persecution, statistics about the number of prisoners, the articles of the penal codes used and misused for sentencing, advocacy developed by the EU and the US institutions, individual case studies and concluding thoughts looking to the future.

The report is based on HRWF’s Database of FoRB Prisoners which has documented over 6,000 individual cases of prisoners and is regularly updated. These prisoners are detained in 20 countries and belong to 18 different religious groups: https://hrwf.eu/prisoners-database/.  

Additionally, research from HRWF’s vast online library of news covering over 50 countries for the period 2018-2020* was used to inform this report.
Click here to read the report online.

For further information, please contact: Email: international.secretariat.brussels@hrwf.net or w.fautre@hrwf.net Website: http://www.hrwf.eu

Footnotes
(*) The widespread detention of Tibetan Buddhists only emerged quite recently on the radar of the international community. As such, the magnitude of this issue is not fully reflected in this report but will be in a subsequent specific report.

(**) Human Rights Without Frontiers Int’l has been monitoring freedom of religion or belief as a non-religious organization since 1989. See its news database online at http://hrwf.eu/newsletters/forb/ . Requests about 2016-2017 can be addressed to the contact information above.

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Scientology requests UN investigate Germany for violating religious freedom
Sep 27 2020
Scientology requests UN investigate Germany for violating religious freedom

Scientologists celebrate the 50th anniversary in Germany and request the UN to launch an investigation on Germany for violating their religious freedom.

Geneva/Munich, Sept 27th – As Scientologists celebrate the 50th anniversary of the German Church of Scientology and its peaceful and fruitful social actions to the benefit of German society, the representative of the European Church requests the UN Human Rights Council to launch an investigation on Germany for violating their Freedom of Religion.

Founded in a villa in the south of Munich in 1970, the Scientology community quickly became the central institution for the entire German-speaking region. To this day, the Munich “Mother Community” is one of the larger organizations of its kind in Europe.

Initially based in Munich-Harlaching, the Church of Scientology needed larger premises by August 1972 and moved to the center of the city to Sendling on Lindwurmstrasse.  which soon became too small as well. In January 1982, it moved into its own building in Munich-Schwabing.

Speakers at the anniversary event emphasized the pioneering work of Scientologists from the first hour. It did not take long since its establishment in Germany, that some people in the government started to discriminate against a growing and socially involved community. Nonetheless, Scientologists did not stop the practice of their religion and continued their peaceful social endeavors such as their fight against drugs, their support of the Constitution, and the promotion of Human Rights.  In defending their religious freedom rights, they have won their recognition as a religious movement by dozens of German courts at various levels.

Veteran Scientologists that participated at the celebration emphasized that “spiritual freedom – despite the well-known resistance from established “vested interests” – could never be suppressed and that all such attempts were doomed to failure”.

In the week in which this celebration is taking place, Scientologists have not lost sight of the opportunity to continue their battle for Freedom of Religion or Belief. In this regard, Ivan Arjona, the European representative of the Church, and founder of the UN-recognized Foundation of the Church [Fundacion para la Mejora de la Vida, la Cultura y la Sociedad], took the issue to the 45th Session of the UN Human Rights Council.

Arjona stated last Thursday and last Friday at the HRC Session chaired by the President of the Human Rights Council, Ms. Elisabeth Tichy-Fisslberger (an Austrian lawyer and diplomat who has served as Austria´s representative to the United Nations and who now chairs the United Nations Human Rights Council since January 2020) that he

watch full statement here

“invites Germany to celebrate this week the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Church of Scientology in their country, and so stop all discrimination and violations of Freedom of Religion or Belief by the authorities against Scientologists”.

Arjona also reminded the Germany representative to the UN that

“Over the past three decades, dozens of German courts have condemned the actions of the government against Scientologists at different levels and recognized their rights as per Article 4 of their Constitution”

and that

“despite the decisions of their judicial powers, for practically 50 years the German executive powers continue to ignore these decisions, and have violated, and still violate today, the rights of this religious minority”.

The statement continues to remind Germany that Independence of Powers does not mean ignoring judicial decisions just to continue ostracizing the members of a minority religion and because of that, Arjona requested the Human Rights Council, to launch an investigation on Germany for violating the Freedom of Religion or Belief.

Scientologists say that German Churches of Scientology are probably the only religious community to have adopted a “Declaration of Principle for Human Rights and Democracy” and accepted it as part of their statutes.

Scientology was founded in 1952 by humanist and philosopher L. Ron Hubbard and opened its first Church in Germany in 1970 in Munich. There are today nine Churches of Scientology in Munich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Hannover, and Hamburg, along with numerous missions and smaller groups throughout the country.

Other mentions:

https://hrwf.eu/scientology-v-germany-50-years-of-legal-battles/

https://freedomofbelief.net/articles/scientology-v-germany-50-years-of-legal-battles

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CESNUR and FOB release “The New Gnomes of Zurich”
Sep 3 2020
CESNUR and FOB release “The New Gnomes of Zurich”

The European Federation on Freedom of Belief, chaired by Mr. Alessandro Amicarelli, reported the following:

On July 9, 2020, the Swiss anti-cult associations JW Opfer Hilfe (Aid to the Victims of Jehovah’s Witnesses) and Fachstelle infoSekta (Center for Information on Cults) issued a press release, announcing that a 2019 decision of the District Court of Zurich had become final, which acquitted Dr. Regina Ruth Spiess, a former employee of infoSekta and current representative of JW Opfer Hilfe, from criminal charges of defamation brought by the Swiss Jehovah’s Witnesses, (JW Opfer Hilfe and Fachstelle infoSekta 2020).

On July 17, 2020—the two events are not related but, as we will see, they came to interact with each other—the USCIRF (United States Commission on International Religious Freedom) published a document on the anti-cult ideology (USCIRF 2020). The USCIRF is a bipartisan commission of the U.S. government, whose members are appointed by the President and designated by the congressional leaders of both political parties, Democrat and Republican. The document focuses on anti-cultism in Russia, but goes beyond it, to identify the anti-cult ideology in general as one of the most serious threats to religious freedom internationally. Parenthetically, we would emphasize that the German word “Sekte” should not be translated into English as “sect” (a neutral word, without derogatory implications in the English language) but as “cult.” Similarly, “anti-sekten” should be translated as “anti-cult,” and vice versa.

On July 23, 2020, the spokeswoman of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, answered during her periodic briefing the USCIRF Report, which was highly critical of Russia and, in particular, of the Russian’s decision to ban the Jehovah’s Witnesses as an “extremist organization.” She confused two different documents—the annual yearly report of the USCIRF and the USCIRF document on anti-cultism of July 17—but she intended in fact to answer the latter.

Zakharova stated that, “Regarding the Jehovah’s Witnesses—perhaps the United States is simply unaware of this, so I would like to enlighten our partners about a court decision recently enforced in Switzerland, one originally issued in July 2019. The court recognized some of the methods used by the local group of Jehovah’s Witnesses as violating fundamental human rights. Don’t you know this? I am referring to the practice where persons who choose to leave the sect or who fail to follow its instructions, are boycotted by their families and friends, children are boycotted, and psychological and social pressure is put on dissidents using various manipulative methods to influence consciousness, punishments, as well as unpunished cases of sexual violence. The sect’s members are actually denied the right to freedom of opinion and conscience, and this is what warranted the attention of Swiss justice” (Zakharova 2020).

There are two problems with Zakharova’s statement… (continued)

 Download the full Jehovah Witnesses’ White Paper “The New Gnomes of Zurich”

The Jehovah Witnesses’ White Paper “The New Gnomes of Zurich” can also be downloaded from the CESNUR website.

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Revealing new book on Scientology by investigator Gabriel Carrion, in 3 languages
Aug 24 2020
Revealing new book on Scientology by investigator Gabriel Carrion, in 3 languages

Reporter Gabriel Carrion launched his book on Scientology and controversies surrounding it with a Church’s spokesperson answering over 50 questions about it.

MADRID/BRUSSELS, SPAIN/BELGIUM, August 24, 2020 /EINPresswire.com/ — Journalist Gabriel Carrion has launched his second book on Scientology and the controversies surrounding it with the Church’s European spokesperson answering over 50 of the most asked questions about this religion.

Gabriel Carrion, a writer, scriptwriter, and director, has worked as an investigative journalist since 1985 in the press, radio, and television. Expert in national terrorism, media, sects, and new religious movements, he has published two books on the Spanish terrorist group ETA. Retired in 2004 from much of his public activities, he returned in 2008 to research and investigate his book “Scientology the Longest Battle”[only available in Spanish], which was published in 2011.

An essential book to know in depth the foundations and pillars of a religion, which due to the closeness of its founder allows us to throw more light than shadows on its history”

Gabriel Carrion

Since then, he has published two more books, one of them on self-help, and, after several years, his recently released book on Scientology (in Spanish, French, and Portuguese so far) entitled: “THE POWER OF THE WORD [EL PODER DE LA PALABRA], through the publishing house “Walking Away”.

El Poder de la Palabra, said Carrion to The European Times, sees the light as an essay of questions and answers that responds in a clear, yet simple way, to some of the hottest topics related to Scientology, a subject on which the author plans to publish three more books in the future finishing off a project he began in 2008, and to which, when he expects to finish in 2022, he will have dedicated 15 years of his life.

BookBrushImage 2020 7 24 20 1732

Asked about the book, Carrion stated that:

“When in 1950 L. Ron Hubbard wrote: ‘DIANETICS, The Modern Science of mental Health’, he was possibly unaware of what was coming his way. Shortly thereafter, after further investigation, he felt he had to take an additional step, and so Scientology emerged as philosophical and religious thought that has derived from the sources of its founder, developing exponentially over time. If thousands are its detractors, millions are its followers throughout the world…

“With a controversial record around the world, Scientology and its leader have left no one indifferent. However, the explosion of social media has allowed, often in an orchestrated and tortious way, falsehoods, and comments about L. Ron Hubbard and his Church”.

Gabriel Carrion, writer, free-thinker, and humanist and Ivan Arjona, President of the European Office of the Church of Scientology for Public Affairs and Human Rights, come face to face in THE POWER OF THE WORD to formulate and answer some of the questions being asked by societies around the world, in order to clarify some of the issues that are part of the fabulous world of lies and dogmatic distortions that also exist.

As Carrion describes it: “An essential book to know in depth the foundations and pillars of a religion, which due to the closeness of its founder allows us to throw more light than shadows on its history”.

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The Irish Hindu Community celebrates its Grand Opening
Aug 22 2020
The Irish Hindu Community celebrates its Grand Opening

There are, estimated, 25,000 Hindus who live in Ireland, according to the director of the Vedic Hindu Cultural Centre

The Irish Times has reported today that Ireland’s first official Hindu Temple has formally opened its doors this Saturday in Walkinstown after two decades of raising funds and planning by the Irish Hindu community.

The new temple, which is marking, according to The Irish Times, its opening by holding a number of small events over the weekend with limited numbers to keep in line with Covid-19 restrictions, and expects thousands of Hindus from all around Ireland to pass through its doors over the coming months.

While the centre will primarily serve as a place of worship for Hindus, it will also offer meditation and yoga classes, language classes, music and dance workshops and be available for school visits and youth activities for the general public, Sudhansh Verma, director of the Vedic Hindu Cultural Centre of Ireland told The Irish Times.

“The community has been waiting for this for a long time so everyone is very excited. Finally we’ll have a place to embrace our culture, we miss that link here. We expect between 8-10,000 people will have visited by the end of the year but for now we have to keep following restrictions on numbers.”

Mr Verma, who has lead the campaign to find a permanent home for a Hindu temple in Ireland for nearly two decades, says the community has been relying on temporary locations to offer space for worship up until now and described the opening as “a historic moment”.

“Before this we were renting places and moving around all the time. We used community centres, school halls, GAA centres but now finally the hunt is over.

“I remember doing my first prayer session in Clontarf castle in 2001 and we had about 200 people. Back then I could count on my fingers how many people from India and Nepal lived here. But the community has grown a lot.

While the 2016 census recorded just over 14,300 Hindus living in Ireland, Mr Verma says the actual figure, when taking into account the number of students, nurses tech workers who have moved here in recent years, is much closer to 25,000 people.

Asked if the Hindu community has experienced any racism or rejection in this country, Mr Verma told The Irish Times that he’s always found Ireland to be “generous and kind”. He underlined that the new centre at the Sunbury Industrial Estate in Walkinstown would be open to people of “all faiths and religions”.

“We as a religion do not believe in fundamentalism; we believe we are all a family and can have different manifestations of God. We want people to live together peacefully and amicably, that is the main objective. This will not only be a spiritual centre but a community centre.”

He added that he hoped the centre’s kitchen could be used to provide food to homeless people working in partnership with local charities. Teenagers studying religion at Leaving Cert level will be able to attend classes on Hinduism at the temple, he said.

While the centre is open to the public, no walk-in visitors will be allowed while Covid-19 restrictions remain in place and access to the site is only available through pre-booking via the Vedic Hindu Cultural Centre.

You can find more information, visit www.hindu.ie

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