Article

Comment

Freedom of Belief

26 June 2023

7 min read

The right to believe – or not: how's the UK doing?

As the UN passes its first ever resolution on freedom of religion, Philip Mounstephen, author of the UK Government review, appraises progress on the issue.

Philip Mounstephen

Philip Mounstephen is Bishop of Truro and Founding Chair of the UK Freedom of Religion or Belief Forum.

A person stands in the burn out shell of a church in Nigeria.

The shell of a burned out Nigerian church.

Open Doors.

I had an unusual start to my Christmas in 2018 when I was rung up by the Archbishop of Canterbury to ask me if I’d be willing to lead a review of the way the Foreign Office had addressed - or otherwise - the persecution of Christians. It became clear that this was a request from the then Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, who was very moved by the issue and clearly concerned both about the human stories of Christians caught up in persecution, and worried that his department just wasn’t doing enough about it.

Six hectic months later, almost exactly four years ago, my review was published and the Government (and not just the Foreign Office) accepted my recommendations in full. So how has the UK got on with their implementation?

Before I address that, however, let me deal with two key aspects of my findings and recommendations which are vital for getting inside this issue.

First, I argued that the most effective way to address the persecution of Christians is to guarantee freedom of religion of belief for all – and that includes the right not to believe - and my recommendations were all framed around that conviction. To argue for special pleading for one group over another would be deeply un-Christian. It would also, ironically, expose that group to greater risk, by isolating them and unintentionally portraying them as agents of the West. We must seek freedom of religion of belief for all, without fear or favour.

Second, we need to understand why this is a such a serious issue in today’s world.

If you lift the stone of persecution and look underneath, what is it that you find? You find authoritarian, totalitarian regimes that are intolerant both of dissent and of minorities; you find aggressive militant nationalism that insists on uniformity; you find religious zealotry and fundamentalism in many different forms that often manifests itself in violence; and in contexts where governments are weak you find gang welfare on an industrial scale driven by drug crime. And you often find those phenomena combined too. In other words, we find massive threats to human flourishing and harmonious communities and ultimately we find in those things significant threats to our own security as well. We can no longer say that this is a sidebar issue of a special interest group. These are huge issues that we face in the world today.

And, the global situation as regards freedom of religion or belief is getting steadily worse, not better, not least in the world’s two most populous countries, China and India. It has certainly worsened significantly since my Review reported. It’s for that reason that the last of my recommendations was that implementation of them all should be independently reviewed three years on from their acceptance. That piece of work was published last summer, just before the UK hosted a major International Ministerial Conference on this issue.

So what did the reviewers conclude? To quote their report:

There has been a positive overall response to the Recommendations, with active steps being taken towards implementing an overwhelming majority of them. However, some of those steps have been taken relatively recently.

I think we can unpack that statement a little. What does ‘There has been a positive overall response to the Recommendations, with active steps being taken towards implementing an overwhelming majority of them’ mean? It means what it says, but it also means that a number of recommendations are in the process of being implemented, but have not yet been completed. And of course it also means that some recommendations remain to be implemented. And what does ‘some of those steps have been taken relatively recently’ mean? Well, it might imply that there was a certain rush of action in the light of the review team’s work being undertaken – all of which underlines the wisdom of including that final recommendation in the first place.

Also of note is the response that the then Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, made to the reviewers’ work:

We welcome and accept this expert review on progress and in line with the findings, accept their assessment for the need to continue to work to promote and strengthen Freedom of Religion or Belief as a fundamental human right for all…

The independent assessment concludes that the majority of the recommendations are either at an advanced stage of delivery or in the process of being delivered, whilst noting that there is still more to do.

Those skilled at reading statements such as this will point out to you the significance of the Foreign Secretary not just welcoming but accepting the findings. And note too the force of that phrase whilst noting that there is still more to do.

And, as I said, that assessment of progress was published just before the UK hosted the International Ministerial Conference last year. And a great event it was. Through it the UK put down a significant marker as to the significance it attaches to this issue. And we have also taken a leading role in the recently established inter-governmental International Religious Freedom of Belief Alliance, with Fiona Bruce MP, Prime Minister’s Special Envoy for Freedom of Religion or Belief currently holding the chair. I take no personal credit for this, but I doubt that either the UK would have hosted the Conference or that Mrs Bruce would have chaired the Alliance had not Jeremy Hunt launched the review – a review which earned him very few political ‘brownie points’ – four and a half years ago.

And yet not all in the garden is rosy. There has been a marked reluctance in some parts of the Foreign Office to recognise the religious dimension in some contexts.

Consider the approach that had been taken to the Middle Belt of Nigeria and the phenomenon of the conflict associated with the Fulani herdsmen. The standard Foreign Office line has been that this is an old conflict between contrasting lifestyles exacerbated by climate change. In other words, the religious dimension is significantly underplayed. A year or so ago the then relevant government minister claimed in a letter to be ‘unaware of substantiated evidence that extremist Islamist ideology is a driver of intercommunal attacks’. I’m afraid that is so completely at odds with the evidence, including that cited in my Review, as to be literally incredible. And, of course, if the Foreign Office claims there is no religious component to the violence they will fail to come up with religiously literate responses to it.

Happily, however more recent statements, in a clear change of tack, have begun to recognise the religious dimension to this unfolding tragedy.

Or take the recent violence in the Indian state of Manipur, with hundreds of churches targeted and destroyed, several killed and thousands displaced. Foreign Office replies to Parliamentary questions about it have been anodyne in the extreme. They remind me of the egregious attitude of the East India Company 250 years ago which protected trade at any price, even in the face of human rights abuses they could otherwise have addressed. Plus ça change.

However even as this article was being written there’s been a further and very significant positive development. Recommendation 20 of my Review called for the UK to sponsor a UN Security Council resolution on this issue. The panel of experts who reviewed implementation last year were not optimistic that it could be achieved. However, on 14 June 2023 the Security Council adopted resolution 2686, a UK-UAE joint resolution on tolerance and religious freedom. Its text addresses growing concern at hate speech and incitement to violence, and calls for action on the persecution of religious and other minorities in conflict. This is the first ever Security Council resolution on this issue, putting it firmly on the international geopolitical table.

In the UK, as elsewhere, we need to recognise that a commitment to freedom of religion or belief is not a ‘nice to have’ in today’s world, additional to the hard world of realpolitik. Not at all it. It touches upon and highlights some key issues in today’s world such as the rise of fundamentalist, nationalistic and authoritarian regimes of all kinds the world over whose treatment of vulnerable minorities is often not short of appalling and whose actions threaten not only the lives and livelihoods of those minorities but also threaten to destabilise international order, increase insecurity, (including food insecurity, as we have seen in this last year) and make it all the harder to address big ticket global issues such as climate change.

Indeed I believe that the wholesale denial of freedom of religion or belief is just one such a big ticket item and I hope and pray we remain sensitised to this issue and appreciate the vital importance of all of us, governments, churches, other faith groups, civil society, and individuals, addressing it with the seriousness and urgency which it undoubtedly requires.

Article

Assisted dying

Care

Comment

Politics

6 February 2025

6 min read

Assisted dying’s problems are unsolvable

There’s hollow rhetoric on keeping people safe from coercion.

Jamie Gillies

Jamie is a freelance writer.

Members of a parliamentary committee sit at a curving table, in front of which a video screen shows other participants.

A parliamentary committee scrutinises the bill.

Parliament TV.

One in five people given six months to live by an NHS doctor are still alive three years later, data from the Department of Work and Pensions shows. This is good news for these individuals, and bad news for ‘assisted dying’ campaigners. Two ‘assisted dying’ Bills are being considered by UK Parliamentarians at present, one at Westminster and the other at the Scottish Parliament. And both rely on accurate prognosis as a ‘safeguard’ - they seek to cover people with terminal illnesses who are not expected to recover.

An obvious problem with this approach is the fact, evidenced above, that doctors cannot be sure how a patient’s condition is going to develop. Doctors try their best to gauge how much time a person has left, but they often get prognosis wrong. People can go on to live months and even years longer than estimated. They can even make a complete recovery. This happened to a man I knew who was diagnosed with terminal cancer and told he had six months left but went on to live a further twelve years. Prognosis is far from an exact science.

All of this raises the disturbing thought that if the UK ‘assisted dying’ Bills become law, people will inevitably end their lives due to well-meaning but incorrect advice from doctors. Patients who believe their condition is going to deteriorate rapidly — that they may soon face very difficult experiences — will choose suicide with the help of a doctor, when in fact they would have gone on to a very different season of life. Perhaps years of invaluable time with loved ones, new births and marriages in their families, and restored relationships.

Accurate prognosis is far from the only problem inherent to ‘assisted dying’, however, as critics of this practice made clear at the – now concluded – oral evidence sessions held by committees scrutinising UK Bills. Proponents of Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill and Liam McArthur’s Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill have claimed that their proposals will usher in ‘safe’ laws, but statements by experts show this rhetoric to be hollow. These Bills, like others before them, are beset by unsolvable problems.

Coercion

Take, for example, the issue of coercion. People who understand coercive control know that it is an insidious crime that’s hard to detect. Consequently, there are few prosecutions. Doctors are not trained to identify foul play and even if they were, these busy professionals with dozens if not hundreds of patients could hardly be counted on to spot every case. People would fall through the cracks. The CEO of Hourglass, a charity that works to prevent the abuse of older people, told MPs on the committee overseeing Kim Leadbeater’s Bill that "coercion is underplayed significantly" in cases, and stressed that it takes place behind closed doors.

There is also nothing in either UK Bill that would rule out people acting on internal pressure to opt for assisted death. In evidence to the Scottish Parliament’s Health, Social Care and Sport Committee last month, Dr Gordon MacDonald, CEO of Care Not Killing, said: “You also have to consider the autonomy of other people who might feel pressured into assisted dying or feel burdensome. Having the option available would add to that burden and pressure.”

What legal clause could possibly remove this threat? Some people would feel an obligation to ‘make way’ in order to avoid inheritance money being spent on personal care. Some would die due to the emotional strain they feel they are putting on their loved ones. Should our society really legislate for this situation? As campaigners have noted, it is likely that a ‘right to die’ will be seen as a ‘duty to die’ by some. Paving the way for this would surely be a moral failure.

Inequality

Even parliamentarians who support assisted suicide in principle ought to recognise that people will not approach the option of an ‘assisted death’ on an equal footing. This is another unsolvable problem. A middle-class citizen who has a strong family support network and enough savings to pay for care may view assisted death as needless, or a ‘last resort’. A person grappling with poverty, social isolation, and insufficient healthcare or disability support would approach it very differently. This person’s ‘choice’ would be by a dearth of support.

As Disability Studies Scholar Dr Miro Griffiths told the Scottish Parliament committee last month, “many communities facing injustice will be presented with this as a choice, but it will seem like a path they have to go down due to the inequalities they face”. Assisted suicide will compound existing disparities in the worst way: people will remove themselves from society after losing hope that society will remove the inequalities they face.

Politicians should also assess the claim that assisted deaths are “compassionate”. The rhetoric of campaigners vying for a change in the law have led many to believe that it is a “good death” — a “gentle goodnight”, compared to the agony of a prolonged natural death from terminal illness. However, senior palliative medics underline the fact that assisted deaths are accompanied by distressing complications. They can also take wildly different amounts of time: one hour; several hours; even days. Many people would not consider a prolonged death by drug overdose as anguished family members watch on to be compassionate.

Suicide prevention

It is very important to consider the moral danger involved with changing our societal approach to suicide. Assisted suicide violates the fundamental principle behind suicide prevention — that every life is inherently valuable, equal in value, and deserving of protection. It creates a two-tier society where some lives are seen as not worth living, and the value of human life is seen as merely extrinsic and conditional. This approach offers a much lower view of human dignity than the one we have ascribed to historically, which has benefited our society so much.

Professor Allan House, a psychiatrist who appeared before the Westminster Committee that’s considering Kim Leadbeater’s Bill, described the danger of taking this step well: “We’d have to change our national suicide prevention strategy, because at the moment it includes identifying suicidal thoughts in people with severe physical illness as something that merits intervention – and that intervention is not an intervention to help people proceed to suicide.”

Professor House expressed concern that this would “change both the medical and societal approach to suicide prevention in general”, adding: “There is no evidence that introducing this sort of legislation reduces what we might call ‘unassisted suicide’.” He also noted that in the last ten years in the State of Oregon – a jurisdiction often held up as a model by ‘assisted dying’ campaigners – “the number of people going through the assisted dying programme has gone up five hundred percent, and the number of suicides have gone up twenty per cent”.

The evidence of various experts demonstrates that problems associated with assisted suicide are unsolvable. And this practice does not provide a true recognition of human dignity. Instead of changing the law, UK politicians must double down on existing, life-affirming responses to the suffering that accompanies serious illness. The progress we have made in areas like palliative medicine, and the talent and technology available to us in 2025, makes another path forwards available to leaders if they choose to take it. I pray they will.

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Find out more and sign up