Norwegian foreign policy has a long history of engagement with human rights. As a founding member of the United Nations and the Council of Europe, Norway has signed, ratified and incorporated all major international human rights treaties and amended and adapted domestic legislation accordingly. This effort to join the international community in creating robust, universal standards for the protection of the rule of law that can lay the foundations for democratic societies and equal rights for all has been a mainstay of the foreign policy of successive Norwegian governments regardless of political orientation. As former US diplomat Knox Thames rightly pointed out in a recent blog post, Norway is a global leader in promoting human rights worldwide.
A New Focus
Over the course of the last decades, however, Norwegian engagement for the universality and indivisibility of human rights has gradually eroded. While the origins of this erosion are complex, an important shift in mentality occurred in the wake of the 2006 cartoon crisis, during which the Norwegian embassy in Damascus was torched, a Norwegian newspaper editor went into hiding after receiving death threats and rioters burned the Norwegian flag in countries around the world. This event heightened the always implicit tension between the freedom of expression and the freedom of religion, sharpening the rhetoric among rights defenders in both camps and preparing the ground for more targeted efforts.
Parliamentarians from the centrist Christian Democratic Party (CDP) have been particularly active over the last decades in challenging the wholesale approach to human rights favoured by earlier governments by promoting a more concerted effort to promote the freedom of religion or belief, supported in particular by the right-wing populist Progress Party (PP). Heavily inspired by the US International Religious Freedom Act (1998) and the institutional structures of monitoring and reporting on the freedom of religion or belief around the world that it created, the CDP has repeatedly urged the government to take action to protect the rights of religious minorities around the world, and to pay particular attention to the freedom of religion or belief in foreign policy. These efforts have been supported by the strategic work of faith-based NGOs, in particular the Stefanus Alliance and Open Doors, missionary organizations that have long been vocal about the need to promote the freedom of religion or belief internationally.
Norway as a promoter of FoRB
In 2011, this strategic work paid off, as the government announced the creation of an ambassadorial post heading up a project for the protection of religious minorities in the Middle East, in part as a response to the turmoil in the region following the Arab Spring. Other initiatives include the foundation of the International Panel of Parliamentarians for Freedom of Religion or Belief (IPPFoRB) in 2014 – a process endorsed and supported by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), the US government agency created to monitor the implementation of the 1998 act. By the end of the 2010s, the promotion of FoRB had become a mainstay of Norwegian foreign policy efforts.
These Norwegian initiatives are not isolated events, but part of an international trend, where ambassadorial posts, NGO projects and parliamentarian groups have been formed in order to promote the idea that FoRB is an orphaned right that is subject to a rising tide of restrictions globally and therefore in need of more robust international protection. From this perspective, the resolution of most global concerns where religion is involved, from the fight against the Islamic state to sectarian violence in Sub-Saharan Africa and the conditions for conducting business and economic growth all depend on more robust protections for FoRB.
What comes next?
So far, Norwegian promotion of FoRB has been limited to sponsoring letter-writing campaigns initiated by parliamentarians, raising concerns about the right in conversations with totalitarian regimes and sponsoring online courses on the contents of the right developed by missionary organizations. These efforts have had limited success, as the right remains precarious around the world, not least because of the inherent interpretational troubles caused by the very architecture of the right – from its scope and legitimate grounds for limitation, to the nexus between beliefs and manifestations. These troubles are repeatedly demonstrated by courts overseeing international human rights law, whose jurisprudence on the freedom of religion or belief is notoriously inconsistent and unpredictable.
Norway should do more to protect the freedom of religion or belief – not least by urging states that have not yet done so to ratify and implement all major international human rights treaties that offer protections against religious discrimination and violations of religious freedom, particularly for vulnerable groups like indigenous peoples, women, children and the disabled. This would include raising the issue with totalitarian states around the world, but also with the US government, which remains the only state in the world not to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and one of only a handful of states to abstain from the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, both of which require the creation of robust and expansive legal safeguards for religious freedom.