Freedom of religion and judicial independence in Cyprus

President Erdogan’s comments raise important issues concerning the independence of the judiciary and a conflict between Turkey’s responsibility for securing human rights in the north

The knee jerk reaction in Europe to anything President Erdogan says or does is invariably negative. When the president of the European Council Charles Michel beat Ursula Von Der Leyen to the only available chair at Ak Saray, like a child playing musical chairs, President Erdogan was blamed for disrespecting her office as commission president in the EU pecking order and her gender.

And so it was last week when he attacked northern Cyprus’ top judge and demanded the reversal of a decision blocking non state supervised teaching of the Quran; except that on this occasion the negative criticisms of Erdogan were well deserved as he was very disrespectful to the Turkish Cypriot supreme constitutional court.

As always in politics it is not what you say but how you say it that causes offence, and the way Erdogan dealt with the decision of the court was so insulting to the judiciary it united the legal profession in their condemnation of his meddling, and they showed their displeasure in public demonstrations in support of secularism and the independence of the judiciary in northern Cyprus.

What happened was that in answer to a question from CNN Turk that the constitutional court had shut down Quran courses, President Erdogan replied that he had instructed his Foreign Minister Mevlüt Cavusoglu to discuss the issue with the Turkish Cypriot leader as it was not possible for him to accept the decision. The judge needed to learn how secularism is handled in Turkey, he said. A change in attitude was needed and he would not tolerate the denial of the right to freedom of religion in the teaching of the Quran.

More ominously, he warned that religious and secularist issues had been resolved in Turkey and that northern Cyprus is not another France and needed to move in line with the model in Turkey. He said that the judge who made the decision needed to correct her error quickly and that if this did not happen, he would have to take appropriate action.

The judge whose decision excited president Erdogan’s ire is none other than Lady Justice Narin Ferdi Şefik, the first woman president of the north’s supreme court.

In the end it turned out to be a storm in a teacup based on a misunderstanding of the court’s ruling.

As the president of religious affairs Talip Atalay said, a permanent solution to the problem could be found by an arrangement that ensures that teaching the Quran and similar activities are carried out under the control and supervision of the ‘education ministry’.

By article 23(4) of the ‘TRNC constitution’, religious education and teaching is supposed to be under the supervision and control of the state as indeed it is in Turkey. Not only that but northern Cyprus is said by its constitution to be a secular republic like it is in Turkey, which means it is officially supposed to be neutral in religious matters – the decision of the court does not say anything different than the constitutions of both Turkey and the ‘TRNC’.

Nonetheless, President Erdogan’s comments raise important issues concerning the independence of the judiciary and a conflict between Turkey’s responsibility for securing human rights in the north and the right to an independent judiciary free from political interference.

The north is unique in that owing to the particular circumstances resulting from the fact that Turkey is in effective control, it is Turkey that is ultimately responsible for securing human rights there, so strictly speaking President Erdogan was not out of order – though he did go over the top deliberately to undermine Turkish Cypriot secularism.

It was decided by the European Court of Human Rights in the landmark decision in Cyprus v Turkey that as the state in effective control of northern Cyprus Turkey has the responsibility of securing the entire range of substantive human rights there. Thus if the right to freedom of religion is violated by any public authority it would be Turkey not the ‘TRNC’ that would be answerable in the European Court of Human Rights.

Had the north’s constitutional court blocked teaching of the Quran to children absolutely this would have been a breach of the right to be taught one’s religion, which forms an integral part of the right to freedom of religion under Article 9 of the ECHR as well as the right of parents to choose their children’s religious education contained in article 2 of the First Protocol.

Some limitation to freedom of religion in the interests of public safety, public order, health or the protection of the rights of others is permissible but only if it is proportionate to a legitimate aim – as occurred recently when gatherings in mosques and churches were suspended to prevent the transmission of Covid-19. However, any limitation to religious teaching including regulatory state supervision and control has to be proportionate to a legitimate head of public policy.

President Erdogan implied that the meaning of a secular republic that he devised for Turkey since 2003 should now be extended to northern Cyprus. From the laicism of Kemal Atatürk that forbade religious involvement in government it became one that reflects the fact that Turkey has a Muslim majority population and converted Hagia Sofía from a museum into a mosque.

What President Erdogan was obliquely attacking, however, was the laicism of Turkey’s founding father Kemal Atatürk whose legacy is very strong among Turkish Cypriots. He said that northern Cyprus is not like France, but Turkish Cypriots are not fervent supporters of secularism in France; they are fervent supporters of the secularist path set by Kemal Atatürk followed by most Turkish Cypriots in the north.

It is true that under European human rights law the exercise of right of freedom to practise the Muslim faith in the north does concern Turkey as the country responsible for securing human rights there, but the right to freedom of religion does not trump the independence of the judiciary. Both are rights under human right law, and you cannot use one right to destroy another.

Alper Ali Riza is a queen’s counsel in the UK and a retired part-time judge

“Religion in US Diplomacy: From Bush to Biden”

On April 15, 2021, Shaun Casey, former Advisor to the Secretary of State, spoke to the Luther College community in a virtual lecture titled “Religion in United States Diplomacy: From Bush to Biden.” This event was sponsored by the Center for Ethics and Public Engagement.

 As the inaugural leader of the State Department’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs, Casey served under the Obama administration from 2013 to 2017. He currently works as the director of the Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University. Casey has also extensively studied the religious actors that impacted diplomatic decisions in the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, and predicted some actions of the Biden administration.

Casey’s lecture evaluated how religion impacts decisions that the United States makes abroad.  He gave insight into the strengths and weaknesses of recent U.S. attempts to incorporate religion into foreign affairs and diplomacy. While procedural changes are ongoing, Casey argued that the Commission on Religious Freedom, established to directly confront internal issues of freedom of religion, should be eliminated, and its charge should be transferred to the State Department. Professor of Political Science Michael Engelhardt commented on the lecture, and the impression some of Casey’s reorganizational proposals had on him.

“I was impressed with Dr. Casey’s command of the facts on religion and its role in diplomacy, especially on the organizations involved,” Engelhardt said. “It was interesting that he thought that [the Commission on Religious Freedom] should be abolished and that the State Department be given authority over the issue. I didn’t even know we had a Commission on Religious Freedom.”

One idea that Casey discussed was the concept of religious literacy in presidential administrations. Religious literacy refers to the ability to know and understand religions that are different from one’s own, and to acknowledge their social, political, historical, and cultural impacts in a global society. Casey discussed the fluctuating rates of religious literacy between administrations, starting with the Bush administration. Casey argued that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, should have served as a wake-up call for the American government to realize the complexities of religion around the world, but it did not.

“The variety of responses in the American population show various levels of religious literacy and illiteracy,” Casey said. “We saw in the lead up to the war on Iraq, I think, willful ignorance of the religious dynamics in the ground. And if you read through the mass of literature looking back at Iraq, it is very clear the administration, at least at the senior levels, didn’t want details that might have slowed down the rush to war. The big idea was that, by invading Iraq, somehow you could transform the Middle East.”

Casey also described a political disregard for the impact religions and religious figures have on foreign governments, and believes this may be a leading factor in the presence of global conflict today. Casey hopes that disputes will lessen in the near future, citing President Biden’s pledges to combat populism both in the United States and abroad. He believes this will help lessen the idea of ‘favored’ and ‘unfavored’ religions in the political and social world.

Associate Professor of Religion Todd Green was involved in organizing Casey’s event. Green is the interim director for the Center of Ethics and Public Engagement, and has served in the State Department as an advisor on Islamophobia in Europe. Green’s connection to Casey, as well as his own expertise and academic interest in the area of religion and global politics, were what brought Casey to Luther. 

“The State Department’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs’ purpose was to advise the Secretary of State on the complexities of religion in global affairs and to help the United States government engage with a broader array of religious actors, and develop a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the complex role that religion plays in the world,” Green said. “Shaun Casey oversaw that entire office. He was arguably one of the top-ranking diplomats in the United States for a few years, when it came to the broader topic of religion and global affairs.”

Green remarked that Casey’s lecture was not only informative, but also timely, and looks forward to seeing how the Luther College community will react to and use what they learned from Casey’s lecture.

St. Joseph in Taneytown celebrates monsignor’s birthday | RELIGION BRIEFS

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Religion is teaching us to hate each other

To the Editor:

The primary thing that all violent countries have is religion. Eliminate religion from the world and violent crime would bottom out. Or start with the two most violent of the worlds religions.
Islamic faiths of the Middle East and Christian faiths of the west. Christianity is an outdated superstition with no relevance for living today. Both Christianity and Muslim worship the same God, yet are mortal enemies due to stupidity. Remove the violent nature from both Christian and Muslim and you have the Jewish belief. Unfortunately, due to the ignorance of most people, no matter what faith they were born into and the built in survival instinct we all have (SUPERSTITION), we are raised to hate and fear each other. SAD.

Lou Card
Wildwood

‘Mixing of religion’ complicates probe, says HC

Punjab and Haryana high court

CHANDIGARH: Tearing into the “blemished and manufactured” investigation carried by recently-retired Punjab Police IGP Kunwar Vijay Pratap Singh in connection with Kotkapura firing case, the Punjab and Haryana high court has held that his “political theatrics” during the investigation had already been established.
Indicting the senior cop, who recently quit the police service, for “unfair” probe to favour one political party, the judge held, “Moreover, the political interest of the current dispensation in the state qua the investigation and the political theatrics of Kunwar Vijay Pratap Singh during the instant investigation by going to media and by repeatedly highlighting allegations against the outgoing politicians without filing challan against them, intended to create a narrative in favour of one political party and against the other party during the election process, has duly been established as per the record.”
The high court has also held that Kunwar Vijay Pratap Singh has gone “to the extent of manufacturing the statements of witnesses to suit his designs,” by recording differing statements of same witnesses in these two FIRs with convenient omissions in their statements recorded under Section 161 CrPc.
‘Conclusions drawn by Singh found to be against statement of witnesses’
According to the high court, the conclusions drawn by Singh are found to be against the statement of witnesses recorded and the material collected by him only.
In his 89-page verdict released on Friday, Justice Rajbir Sehrawat of the HC has held that the public pressure to get the alleged erring police officials convicted also appears to have adversely affected the fairness of the investigation.
“As a result the fairness of investigation stands vitiated. The investigation conducted by Kunwar also suffers from malice, irrationality and absurdity. Hence, this court is of the considered opinion that this is one of the rare cases where the court is under duty to step-in to prevent miscarriage of justice, instill confidence in the investigation and also to preempt the misuse of the process of the court; by quashing the investigation filed in these two cases, while leaving state to fairly investigate these two cases again,” the HC held while quashing the probe conducted by Kunwar Vijay Pratap Singh.
In another significant observation, the Justice Sehrawat held the conclusion that the protesters were sitting peacefully when the police started firing and also the conclusion that firing by the police was unprovoked is against the record even on this count.
“Needless to say, that the firing is stated to have taken place at the third stage, after the third order passed by the civil authorities and not in the first instance. However, before that; in the above description itself; the protesters are recorded to have chased and attacked the police, including with the swords,” clarified the HC in its order.
The high court passed these orders after hearing a petition filed by police officials, Gurdeep Singh and Rashpal Singh seeking the quashing of subsequent FIR registered in the Kotkapura firing case. They had also requested the high court for removal of senior IPS officer Kunwar Vijay Pratap Singh from probe into this case.
The petitioner cops had also argued that while registering FIR against them, the fact was ignored that more than 50 cops had also received injuries when they were performing their duties.

Your Religion News: April 24, 2021

Report: Religion in China Suffers ‘Most Serious Crackdown Since the Cultural Revolution’

Chinese authorities have significantly intensified their crackdown on all religious minorities over the past two years, Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) revealed Tuesday in a comprehensive report.

Policy-making in China “is more centralised, repression is more intense and wide-spread, and technology is being refined for the creation of a surveillance state,” declared ACN’s Religious Freedom in the World Report 2021, an 818-page compilation of the state of religious freedom and persecution in the world today.

Religion Is By Choice; You Don’t Need To Kill People – Samklef

Veteran record music producer, Samuel Oguachuba, alias Samklef has said that religion is by choice and not by force.

The music producer turned blogger noted this during his exchange with a Twitter user who told him not to color all Muslims with the same brush.

The producer then replied that religion should not get to the point of killing one another. He went on to add that he has friends from other religions.

Read Also: Nigerians Go To Church Because They Want A Miracle, Not To Worship God – Samklef

“Religion is by choice u don’t need to kill people or force people. I have Muslim friends. I have Hindu’ Friends also growing up one of my classmate in fagba his father was a babalawo. I love human beings“, he wrote.

See the exchange below:

Gay Couple Denied Wedding on Basis of Religion

The special events facility Highgrove Estate in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina has cited their “Christian beliefs” as justifiable reason for refusing gay couple McCae Henderson and Ike Edwards the opportunity to utilize the site for their upcoming wedding. 

Having served the area’s community for almost twenty years, Highgrove’s reputation boasts beautiful ambience, polished decor and a perfect setting for picturesque ceremonies. These qualities are what drew newly engaged couple Henderson and Edwards to the company website. 

After emailing the venue, the pair was stunned to receive the following message:

“[O]ur owner has unfortunately chosen not to participate in same-sex weddings at this time. However, she wants to ensure that you still have the best wedding day experience possible, and has given me a list of several other wonderful venues in the area that may interest you.”

Should LGBTQ nondiscrimination laws be put into place in North Carolina, this kind of action would be illegal. As the current legislation stands, Highgrove may refuse service to any unprotected members of the LGBTQ community. 

Although there are several positive reviews of the venue, the negative few are scathing and angry. A previous client posted online, “Vicky STILL refused to give me my money back, so we went to court.” Others mentioned unprofessionalism and unwillingness to accommodate guests’ needs. In response to the uproar from allies and the LGBTQ community, Highgrove Estate posted the following on their Instagram page: 

“Highgrove Estate desires that all people’s weddings be the most joyful in their lives. Highgrove also respects people’s differences regarding marriage. For this reason, we will always be kind and caring when these differences arise…although Highgrove…cannot deliver what is being requested as the company holds strong to its Christian beliefs.”

These words did not placate fiancés Edwards and Henderson who said, “I don’t think you get to be homophobic because your religion tells you to be homophobic.” 

This is not the first time North Carolina wedding venues have made headlines for refusing to host same-sex ceremonies. In 2020, a lesbian couple was turned away from a Winston-Salem venue on the basis of their sexual orientation.

Join us: This story is made possible with the help of qnotes’ contributors. If you’d like to show your support so qnotes can provide more news, features and opinion pieces like this, give a regular or one-time donation today.

A view from Dave Trott: Numbers is the new religion

De Correspondent is an online media news platform – they have an analogy for the way online advertising works.

Imagine Luigi’s Pizza wants more customers, Luigi prints lots of money-off coupons.

He employs two teenagers to hand these out to potential customers.

After a week, one of the kids seems to have done well, all of his coupons have been used.

The other kid seems to have done less well, not all of his coupons have been used.

Luigi asks them where they handed out the coupons.

The unsuccessful kid says he walked the streets giving them out to random people.

The successful kid says he gave them to people already queueing up to buy pizza.

Giving your coupons to people who are already waiting to buy is the “selection effect”.

You don’t get any new customers, just people who were going to buy anyway.

Giving your coupons to people who aren’t waiting to buy is the “advertising effect”.

You get less uptake but they are all new customers, all converts.

This is the difference between online advertising and conventional advertising.

Steve Tadelis was professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ebay employed him to prove the effectiveness of their online advertising.

They told him it relied on “proprietary transformation functions”.

He knew this was just jargon for statistics that equated expenditure with sales.

But, as an economist, he knew correlation does not equal causation.

He persuaded them to stop spending across one third of the Google network.

After three months, the results were identical where they had spent and where they hadn’t.

So eBay had been wasting $20m on key-word advertising.

The clicks they got from paid-for online advertising were clicks they would have got anyway.

The numbers showed that they weren’t making $12.28 for every dollar, they were losing 63 cents on every dollar.

So what happened as a result – did eBay change their online advertising?

Quite the reverse, as Justin Rao of Yahoo! and Microsoft said: “No-one wants to know, no-one cares.”

He was employed to run a test on online advertising effectiveness – the client in charge of the budget said to him: “I better warn you, if the results come back negative, I won’t believe you.”

Rao said to him: “If this is about religion, I can’t help you. I have nothing against religion, but I don’t think it has a place in marketing analytics.”

So why do people keep spending vast budgets on online advertising?

I once asked someone at the local council, why all the roadworks happen after Christmas.

He said, budgets for the coming year are set at the end of March.

If you haven’t spent all your budget by then, it looks like you didn’t need it so it’ll be cut.

So, if you don’t want your budget cut, you make sure to spend it before the end of the year.

Is that the reason marketing people spent $273bn, globally, on online advertising?

David Reiley used to head Yahoo!’s economics team.

He said: “Bad methodology makes everyone happy: it makes the publisher happy, it makes the person who bought the media happy, it makes the boss of the person who bought the media happy, it makes the ad agency happy. Everybody can brag that they had a very successful campaign.”

Randall Lewis confronted the man responsible for evaluating Yahoo!’s marketing strategy.

He admitted that he omitted data if it led to the “wrong” results.

As Lewis said: “That is bad scientific practice, but it’s great job preservation practice.”

So, basically, what we already knew.

Marketers are mainly successful at marketing their own marketing.

Dave Trott is the author of The Power of Ignorance, Creative Blindness and How to Cure It, Creative Mischief, Predatory Thinking and One Plus One Equals Three

Wisconsin anti-religion foundation looks to challenge North Dakota’s Ten Commandments law

                    The Freedom from Religion Foundation based in Madison, Wis., is starting to put together evidence to possibly sue the state over the law.</p>                            <p>Dan Barker, the foundation's co-president, said the law is unconstitutional, and it's an attempt to sneak Christian values into the classroom.</p>                            <p>"Believers are free to have them in the churches and in their homes — this is a free country — but they're not free to impose their private religious views on the rest of the students," he said.</p>                                      

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</div>                        <p>Supporters of the law say this gives schools more freedom and control over displaying the Ten Commandments and other documents, but Barker argued they shouldn't be put up at all in schools.</p>                                      <p>The law also requires the Ten Commandments be displayed alongside other historical documents. The foundation said in a statement that is against the <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/449/39/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Stone v. Graham decision in the United States Supreme Court</a>, which bars any Ten Commandments display in a public school.</p>                            <p>"To put some window dressing around it as if, 'Oh, there's a secular purpose here,' does not erase the religious purpose," Barker said.</p>                            <p>While the state law has a provision in it that shields school boards, teachers and administrators from legal liability for the Ten Commandments displays, attorneys noted it won't protect them from federal lawsuits.</p>    

Parent like your religion depends on it

(RNS) — We all know that more young people are leaving religion today, and there’s a wealth of research about the characteristics of the ones who stay versus the ones who leave. What do the most religious kids have in common? Why do they stay involved in their parents’ faith?

There’s far less research, however, about those people’s parents. Amy Adamczyk, a professor of sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, wanted to turn the usual questions around and focus on parents: How do they go about raising faithful kids?

With Christian Smith, a sociologist at the University of Notre Dame, Adamczyk combed several national surveys for information and conducted over 200 interviews, resulting in the book “Handing Down the Faith: How Parents Pass Their Religion on to the Next Generation,” out this week from Oxford University Press. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

One of the main findings of your research is that parents are still the most influential drivers of whether their children will grow up to be religious, and that this is an ongoing, daily thing. How does that happen?

The parents can’t be just putting on a show for their kids. The parents who pass down their religion really believe this stuff. It’s very important to them. And so they are always looking for opportunities to talk with their kids, where religious topics are regularly engaged in conversation.

Those conversations have to be two-way. A lot of parents might want to just preach to their kids or give a little sermon to tell them how it is. That might be the easier path, but the most successful parents are the ones who let the conversations be organic, growing from the kids’ own questions.

We also found that the most successful parents often reflected on all the conversations they’d had with their own parents. They were constantly talking about how they were raised, evaluating what they liked, and what they were going to do differently. They were constantly trying to get ideas about how to improve on what their own parents did.

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In the book you contrast four main parenting styles: authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, and less engaged. What was the best style for raising religious kids?  

The authoritative parenting style, where they mix a strictness about religion with warmth, with a lot of love. That seemed to be most successful for passing on religious beliefs, whatever those beliefs were. The authoritative parents set clear expectations with regard to religion. They were going to church if they were Christian, they were having Bible study, they were doing various things and encouraging their kids to attend.

At the same time, they had a lot of love and warmth. They encouraged their children’s questions; they had those two-way conversations. So if the children didn’t respond well to some of the parents’ limitations, the children knew that they weren’t going to necessarily lose their parents’ love over it. They weren’t going to be excluded from their caring.

That’s a little bit different than the authoritarian style, where parents tend to be much colder and more distant. They also have strict expectations about religion, but unlike the authoritative parents, the authoritarian parents aren’t really mixing it with that love and engagement. Part of the reason the authoritative style is so successful is that the kids want to emulate their parents. They actually like their parents.

I was intrigued by what you said in the book about how successful religious transmission isn’t just a one-way street, where parents are imparting their religion. They’re also being influenced by their children’s faith. How does that work?

When parents are looking for openings where they can engage religion with their kids, they’re learning too. As they’re trying to explain this information to the kids, they’re kind of thinking it through themselves as well. Some of that might be very concrete, like their kids are suddenly interested in certain types of Bible stories and want to know more.

Then other times, it might be about questions that the kids are raising, like what happens to a decomposing body or why is it that we do this thing. And of course, a lot of adults don’t know why we do certain things or have a tradition, so they get excited to find out. So I think the kids can push the parents to think in new ways.

What surprised you most from your research?

Honestly? How small the role was of religious congregations. Almost none of our parents said that congregations were primarily responsible for transmitting religious belief to their children. I mean, they use the congregations, and they want the congregations nearby. They want congregations that can give kids a community of young people so their kid doesn’t feel like the only one.

But successful religious parents don’t just drop their kid off at church and then expect someone there will take care of everything. Maybe that was a perspective from 40 years ago, like my dad’s generation. But today, parents want to be involved in just about every aspect of their children’s lives, including transmission of religion.

You make the point, though, that most parents also don’t want their kids becoming too religious. Even the most religious parents don’t want to raise fanatics or extremists.

The parents sort of set the limits for how religious they wanted their kids to be. And this was fascinating for me. It was across a range of different religions, everybody from Muslims to Hindus to Mormons — a lot of them were very clear about saying, “We don’t want our kids to be too religious.” I think this reflects a shift in American religion, whereby religion used to be seen in a very different way. The purpose of religion used to be more intense, that it should shape what people viewed as good and desirable. It should govern their behaviors, maybe put some controls on things, tell people what’s right and wrong, and eventually help them to get to the ultimate place.

Religion has been shifting over the last 100 years, where it’s become a much more therapeutic device. It’s more about having a good and happy individual life. That’s kind of the shift that we observed in the work that we were doing. When parents would talk about their kids, it was very much about how they wanted them to be happy or to be good people, and religion was a tool to help them do that. Religion now is about a sense of personal identity.

Related content about religion and young people:

More young adults are leaving religion, but that’s not the full story, say researchers

GenZ is lukewarm about religion, but open to relationships, study shows