Baroness Warsi chairs meeting on combating religious intolerance

(Vatican Radio) Ministers from Europe, North America, Asia and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation are meeting at the United Nations in New York on Thursday to discuss the difficult question of combating religious intolerance. The meeting forms part of an ongoing process to put into practice the goals of a UN Human Rights Council resolution focused on promoting the rights of all people to full religious freedom and expression
Among those spearheading this initiative is Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, Senior Minister for State at the British Foreign Office and Minster for Faith and Communities within the UK. She told Philippa Hitchen that protection of the rights of believers is a top personal priority for her…

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The issue of freedom of religion and belief, as part of my human rights brief and specifically on combating religious intolerance, is a personal priority for me…..and one of the things that I felt was lacking was to create a sense of political will around the world….

I think in the past, unfortunately, this has been seen as a discussion that takes place between the West and the rest of the world and I wanted to break down that barrier and find like-minded politicians from around the world who could reach agreement on what were the basic requirements of tolerance within our multi-faith societies…

I felt we needed to be much more pro-active and not respond to situations when things had gone wrong but to create political will and consensus in advance……so that over a period of time we could really patiently and in detail unpick some of these quite big discussions and arguments about what the parametres are of religious tolerance..

We already have international agreement in the form of resolution 16/18 at the Human Rights Council, but I feel it’s important for states to demonstrate how they’re implementing the spirit of 16/18…….

Conflicting views and conflicting rights have always been part of the human rights discourse…but what we believe in here in the UK is the protection of individuals and where an individual is attacked or under threat, then no amount of freedom of speech can justify inciting somebody to attack an individual. We don’t protect religion but we do protect followers of religion……

As a British Muslim, I feel it's just as important to speak out about anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim hatred as it is for me to speak out about the persecution of Christians around the world and I've done that regularly........