In February of this year, Professor Nazila Ghanea, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, submitted a proper report on the link between torture prevention and religious liberty.
Having served for almost three decades in international human rights law, Ghanea provides a quite understandable interpretation of this concept. The main thesis of the report is formulated beautifully at the end of the report: “To the best of the researcher’s knowledge, there are no published materials that specifically address the relationship between these rights.” This is so because the report, when read in full, is a novel way of looking at how religious freedom and torture prevention are linked.
From the study made by Ghanea, the following conclusion is made; Coercion is the main link between these two rights. In particular, the report states, ‘Coercion can be in the form of physical or in the form of psychological/mental coercion.
These two aspects are naturally interlinked.’ This is a significant revelation that goes against the grain of human rights discourse by illustrating how attempts to change or restrict people’s religious beliefs amount to psychological torture.
The report gives a clear picture of systemic violations, with the emphasis on the discriminative practices that impact minority groups and women in particular. One of the most striking extracts from the document is the one that shows how “non-Muslims were coerced to change their beliefs through denial of work, food aid and education,” which the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights said is against the religion and torture conventions. Importantly, the report goes beyond the theoretical analysis and focuses on the experiences of victims.
It points out that “States, State officials, courts, treaty bodies and even people working directly with victims have not always considered both rights in cases with concurrent issues.” This systematic neglect puts victims at higher risk of being victimized again.
The research reveals definite patterns of religiously motivated maltreatment, including:
- to demand from individuals to act in a way that is prohibited by their religious beliefs.
- interference with the practice of religion.
- Psychological harassment of certain religious groups.
A particularly revealing case study from the report is a case from Guantanamo Bay and a detainee who claimed that guards would ‘seize religious books, place them on the floor and walk on them, and then tear the pages,’ and even ‘placed the Qur’an in a tank containing urine and excreta’. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights analysed such actions based on two key criteria: ‘the purpose for which the act was inflicted’, and ‘the intensity of the suffering that the claimant suffered”.
The report’s recommendations for states are comprehensive and transformative:
- Prohibit absolutely coercion in connection with religious beliefs
- Prohibit attempts to change people’s religious views
- Fully take into consideration the physical and psychological effects of religious coercion
- Train the judicial personnel
- Learn and prevent forms of torture compounded by religious humiliation.
This is the most urgent demand of Professor Ghanea:
“It is a serious problem that very few legal cases involving these rights have been brought before international bodies while this mandate has documented hundreds of cases of violations over the years”.
The significance of this report is not only academic. By considering religious freedom in relation to torture prevention, Ghanea provides a important contribution to how human rights violations can be prevented systematically.
As religious differences as social and political conflict continue to rise around the globe, this report arrives as a crucial and necessary contribution to the human rights discourse, urging institutions around the world to further refine their approaches to protecting human dignity.
