Panel 3: Freedom of Speech and Religion in the Public Domain
Shami Chakrabarti
It is my pleasure to be here.
Forgive me for being slightly cheeky about magna carta celebrations, of course we all celebrate a
document that has become inspirational to lawyers and human rights folk all over the world, we
celebrate it of course as the beginning of a very very long journey towards fundamental rights and
freedoms in this country and elsewhere in the world, but sometimes we do rather sentimentalise
magna carta in this country and sometimes it is sentimentalised and celebrated by the same people
who would scrap our human rights act and would pull us out of the European Convention on Human
Rights, which is actually giving the practical, legal enforceable protection to people in this country.
So that’s my little teaser about magna carta, in the words of a great great legal philosopher and also
a comedian Tony Hancock ‘remember Magna Carta - did she die in vain?’ So, yes we must not
sentimentalise all sorts of unpleasantness in that document as it is from 1215 – there is not much joy
for Jews or women, serfs, and so on. It is the beginning of the journey and not the journey’s end.
I’m the Director of Liberty, the National Council for Civil Liberties in the UK we are a domestic
Human Rights organisation, but of course the lines between domestic and international are
increasingly blurred in this interconnected world of ours, and what happens here matters over
there, and this is the nature of communications and culture and migrations.
Some people in the modern world identify with brothers and sisters from their particular religious
group, women identify with each other as feminists. This needs to be remembered when dealing
with the challenges as well as the opportunities that that kind of transnational multiple identity and
transnational continued solidarity can bring. I would like to raise a number of points:
There is the small question of religion – it may be strange to talk of religion in England – it is not
quite polite talking of religion – it is not the done thing in UK, as Alastair Campbell said: ‘We don’t do
religion’.
So what do we do about the small question of religion?
It may seem very prescriptive and un-libertarian but as I see it modern society has three choices of
how to deal with religion:
1. Pick your favourite religion, any religion, once selected make it the most important belief
system and imbed it in to your law, politics and culture at the expense of everything else.
Extreme examples of this can be seen all over the world in ancient and recent times. I’m not
suggesting that we go down that road, back to ancient Christendom, Afghanistan Taliban.
There are problems with this type of approach when one belief system, a patriarchal
traditional religious system, is promoted above all others at the expense of all other thinking
and value systems in a society.
2. Choice 2 says it is all deeply dangerous, divisive mumbo jumbo, no good will ever come of it
only lead to discrimination and bloodshed and intolerance. We would rather not have it at
all, but if we must, we will chase it away from public sphere to the private sphere, from the
religious space of the church, the mosque , the temple, and hide it at home. I have
obviously caricatured that proposition. I don’t support that either. Extreme examples can be
seen in Stalin’s Russia, more contemporary examples closer to home hold the idea that
religion is inherently suspect.
3. I guess the caricatures of these two choices indicate that I’m going to promote a third, as a
Human Rights person I believe that the post WW2 settlement - the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights does point towards a third
approach. I would attempt to articulate it as follows: human rights do not just protect but
also reflect everything that it is to be human – lawyers bang on about rights and forget the
human part. A natural aspect of the human condition is to be a creature of faith and logic, of
emotion as well as reason. People of no religious conviction will sometimes make very
important decisions based on things other than very careful calculations and deductions.
Just as it must be true that religion has inspired and been an excuse for horrible bloodshed
with torture chambers and jihad, equally religion has inspired some wonderful acts of
humanity, of art and music and charity and altruism, all sorts of good things as well. Just as
science and technology has cured disease and given us all sorts of enormous progress,
scientists and engineers also said: ‘guess what, it’s too many bullets to kill all these Jews,
let’s build gas chambers instead.’
So I think both the faith and the logic parts of the human condition need to be understood
and both science and technology and faith and religion can have their great ambassadors
and their less positive ones, so I suggest that for modern societies that understanding
globalisation as a reality and not just a threat, modern societies that care about human
rights do respect freedom of thought conscience and religion. Of course you have the right
to your faith of choice and a right to no faith and most importantly, the right to be a heretic
within any faith community, a gay Muslim or Christian, to be female Christian or Muslim. I
would suggest a less patriarchal, more equal approach to practicing faith and living in the
world. When we get into these cases that Michael Tugendhat has talked about we are often
dealing with clashes of rights and clashes of claims of rights with conscience on the one hand
and expression and equal treatment on the other. Liberty has been involved in some of
these cases domestically and in the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. There is not time
to go into each of them but the first proposition is that the state should only interfere with
people’s faith when it is necessary and proportionate in protecting the rights and freedoms
of others and not just because the state wants to impose identity on people – it cannot be
and should not be imposed.
Therefore I do not support the banning of religious dress or symbols in public or in the work
place save where a case is made out that it is necessary to do that for a particular reason
and the action is proportionate to that reason. Equally I do not believe that peoples’
consciences should allow them to discriminate against their neighbours and their fellow
human beings in the provision of goods and service when we now have a democratic
settlement in Britain and in most parts of Europe it is as wrong to discriminate on grounds of
gender and sexuality as it is on grounds of race, and there I will stop.
Shami Chakrabarti