16 June 2007
This public one-day conference in Torino, Italy, on Saturday 16 June 2007 was organised in collaboration with the Consulta Torinese per la Laicit delle Istitutzioni and the Unione degli Atei e degli Agnostici Razionalisti (UAAR) and run in conjunction with the 2007 General Assembly. Programme Introductory remarks by EHF President David Pollock Speech by Claude Singer
SEPARATION OR COMMUNITARIANISM or: Is the French model really only French? Everybody knows that France lives under a regime of separation of religions and the State. This separation – which is called [la cité] secularism and I’ll debate this point later – appears through three great pillars of our republic: the laws on education at the beginning of the 1880’s, the 1905 law itself, called law of separation between the Churches and the State, and… read more »
Introductory remarks by EHF President David Pollock I wish first to thank the eminent representatives of Piedmont and of Torino for their warm welcome, and then to welcome the IHEU delegates who are joining the EHF for this one-day conference, and with them so many of our Italian friends. Europe was once a Christian continent. It barely is so any longer. Some countries have a majority of unbelievers. In many others most who call themselves… read more »
15 June 2007
I realised before I became President of the EHF a year ago that there were different views in different countries about Humanism, secularism, and laicité, and about what constitutional arrangements were desirable – strict separation of church and state, neutrality of the state vis-a-vis religion, or some other arrangement, and about how far the state should co-opt religion into its machinery. I thought at least I could start to sort out the tangle. But a… read more »
Click here to open EHF annual report for 2006.
8 June 2007
The EHF was at the OSCE High Level Conference on Combating Discrimination and Promoting Mutual Respect and Understanding in Bucharest on 7-8 June 2007 and submitted the following recommendations: (1) The struggle for human rights is a vital contribution to the development of democracy, but human rights are threatened by governments that give a privileged position to religious bodies and base legislation on religious morality and rules. We therefore recommend that OSCE ODIHR report on the… read more »