Jaswant Singh Khalra was remembered at the Human Rights Council

On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the death of Jaswant Singh Kharla CAP Freedom of Conscience, United Sikhs, Khalra Mission Organization and the author of the book The Valiant – Jaswant Singh Khalra  Gurmeet Kaur made a statement to the UN during the 45th session of the Human Rights Council.

According to the president of CAP LC,

“it is time for the truth to be revealed and for the families of the victims to know the truth about the fate of their loved one” and continued saying that “it is the duty of the Indian authorities to shed light on this crime against humanity”. (Their full statement can be seen here)

Jaswant Singh Kharla’s crime is to have uncovered, according to his book

“thousands of state-enforced disappearances, illegal detentions, custodial killings, and mass cremations of the Sikhs under government’s orders, which constitute the Sikh genocide”.

After its discovery Jaswant Singh Kharla  took as his mission to stop the “government’s tyranny” by exposing and “holding it accountable through legal means”. 

On January 16, 1995, he made public evidence of 3,100 illegal cremations of disappeared persons in just three crematoria from one out of the then thirteen districts in Punjab. He estimated there were a total of 25,000 cremations of disappeared persons throughout the state.

On September 6, 1995, Jaswant Singh Khalra  himself was abducted in broad daylight, tortured in illegal custody for 52 days before being shot dead; his body dismembered and dumped into the very canal that was used to dispose other bodies that he had set out to find.

Author Gurmeet Kaur who wrote The Valiant – Jaswant Singh Khalra said:

“Twenty-five years later, we hope the government will not obstruct efforts to document the gravity of the state-sponsored genocide before nature takes its course and the aging witnesses and parents of the disappeared die”.

Scientology requests UN investigate Germany for violating religious freedom

Scientologists celebrate the 50^th anniversary in Germany and request the UN to launch an investigation on Germany for violating their religious freedom.

Geneva/Munich, Sept 27th – As Scientologists celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the German Church of Scientology and its peaceful and fruitful social actions to the benefit of German society, the representative of the European Church requests the UN Human Rights Council to launch an investigation on Germany for violating their Freedom of Religion.

Founded in a villa in the south of Munich in 1970, the Scientology community quickly became the central institution for the entire German-speaking region. To this day, the Munich “Mother Community” is one of the larger organizations of its kind in Europe.

Initially based in Munich-Harlaching, the Church of Scientology needed larger premises by August 1972 and moved to the center of the city to Sendling on Lindwurmstrasse.  which soon became too small as well. In January 1982, it moved into its own building in Munich-Schwabing.

Speakers at the anniversary event emphasized the pioneering work of Scientologists from the first hour. It did not take long since its establishment in Germany, that some people in the government started to discriminate against a growing and socially involved community. Nonetheless, Scientologists did not stop the practice of their religion and continued their peaceful social endeavors such as their fight against drugs, their support of the Constitution, and the promotion of Human Rights.  In defending their religious freedom rights, they have won their recognition as a religious movement by dozens of German courts at various levels.

Veteran Scientologists that participated at the celebration emphasized that “spiritual freedom – despite the well-known resistance from established “vested interests” – could never be suppressed and that all such attempts were doomed to failure”.

In the week in which this celebration is taking place, Scientologists have not lost sight of the opportunity to continue their battle for Freedom of Religion or Belief. In this regard, Ivan Arjona, the European representative of the Church, and founder of the UN-recognized Foundation of the Church [Fundacion para la Mejora de la Vida, la Cultura y la Sociedad], took the issue to the 45^th Session of the UN Human Rights Council.

Arjona stated last Thursday and last Friday at the HRC Session chaired by the President of the Human Rights Council, Ms. Elisabeth Tichy-Fisslberger (an Austrian lawyer and diplomat who has served as Austria´s representative to the United Nations and who now chairs the United Nations Human Rights Council since January 2020) that he

watch full statement here

“invites Germany to celebrate this week the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Church of Scientology in their country, and so stop all discrimination and violations of Freedom of Religion or Belief by the authorities against Scientologists”.

Arjona also reminded the Germany representative to the UN that

“Over the past three decades, dozens of German courts have condemned the actions of the government against Scientologists at different levels and recognized their rights as per Article 4 of their Constitution”

and that

“despite the decisions of their judicial powers, for practically 50 years the German executive powers continue to ignore these decisions, and have violated, and still violate today, the rights of this religious minority”.

The statement continues to remind Germany that Independence of Powers does not mean ignoring judicial decisions just to continue ostracizing the members of a minority religion and because of that, Arjona requested the Human Rights Council, to launch an investigation on Germany for violating the Freedom of Religion or Belief.

Scientologists say that German Churches of Scientology are probably the only religious community to have adopted a “Declaration of Principle for Human Rights and Democracy” and accepted it as part of their statutes.

Scientology was founded in 1952 by humanist and philosopher L. Ron Hubbard and opened its first Church in Germany in 1970 in Munich. There are today nine Churches of Scientology in Munich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Hannover, and Hamburg, along with numerous missions and smaller groups throughout the country.

Other mentions:

https://hrwf.eu/scientology-v-germany-50-years-of-legal-battles/

https://freedomofbelief.net/articles/scientology-v-germany-50-years-of-legal-battles

CESNUR and FOB release "The New Gnomes of Zurich"

The European Federation on Freedom of Belief, chaired by Mr. Alessandro Amicarelli, reported the following:

On July 9, 2020, the Swiss anti-cult associations JW Opfer Hilfe (Aid to the Victims of Jehovah’s Witnesses) and Fachstelle infoSekta (Center for Information on Cults) issued a press release, announcing that a 2019 decision of the District Court of Zurich had become final, which acquitted Dr. Regina Ruth Spiess, a former employee of infoSekta and current representative of JW Opfer Hilfe, from criminal charges of defamation brought by the Swiss Jehovah’s Witnesses, (JW Opfer Hilfe and Fachstelle infoSekta 2020).

On July 17, 2020—the two events are not related but, as we will see, they came to interact with each other—the USCIRF (United States Commission on International Religious Freedom) published a document on the anti-cult ideology (USCIRF 2020). The USCIRF is a bipartisan commission of the U.S. government, whose members are appointed by the President and designated by the congressional leaders of both political parties, Democrat and Republican. The document focuses on anti-cultism in Russia, but goes beyond it, to identify the anti-cult ideology in general as one of the most serious threats to religious freedom internationally. Parenthetically, we would emphasize that the German word “Sekte” should not be translated into English as “sect” (a neutral word, without derogatory implications in the English language) but as “cult.” Similarly, “anti-sekten” should be translated as “anti-cult,” and vice versa.

On July 23, 2020, the spokeswoman of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, answered during her periodic briefing the USCIRF Report, which was highly critical of Russia and, in particular, of the Russian’s decision to ban the Jehovah’s Witnesses as an “extremist organization.” She confused two different documents—the annual yearly report of the USCIRF and the USCIRF document on anti-cultism of July 17—but she intended in fact to answer the latter.

Zakharova stated that, “Regarding the Jehovah’s Witnesses—perhaps the United States is simply unaware of this, so I would like to enlighten our partners about a court decision recently enforced in Switzerland, one originally issued in July 2019. The court recognized some of the methods used by the local group of Jehovah’s Witnesses as violating fundamental human rights. Don’t you know this? I am referring to the practice where persons who choose to leave the sect or who fail to follow its instructions, are boycotted by their families and friends, children are boycotted, and psychological and social pressure is put on dissidents using various manipulative methods to influence consciousness, punishments, as well as unpunished cases of sexual violence. The sect’s members are actually denied the right to freedom of opinion and conscience, and this is what warranted the attention of Swiss justice” (Zakharova 2020).

There are two problems with Zakharova’s statement… (continued)

 Download the full Jehovah Witnesses’ White Paper “The New Gnomes of Zurich”

The Jehovah Witnesses’ White Paper “The New Gnomes of Zurich” can also be downloaded from the CESNUR website.