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About Humanists Uk in This Submission ABOUT HUMANISTS UK At Humanists UK, we want a tolerant world where rational thinking and kindness prevail. We work to support lasting change for a better society, championing ideas for the one life we have. Our work helps people be happier and more fulfilled, and by bringing non-religious people together we help them develop their own views and an understanding of the world around them. Founded in 1896, we are trusted to promote humanism by over 85,000 members and supporters and over 100 members of the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group. Through our ceremonies, pastoral support, education services, and campaigning work, we advance free thinking and freedom of choice so everyone can live in a fair and equal society. We work closely with Humanists International, founded in 1952 as the global representative body of the humanist movement, with over 170 member organisations in over 70 countries, and of which our Chief Executive is also the current President. We are also a member of the European Humanist Federation (EHF). We have good relations with the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the Department for International Development (DfID), including being part of the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy on Freedom of Religion or Belief’s regular roundtables. We are an active member of the All Party Parliamentary Group on International Freedom of Religion and Belief (FoRB) and are accredited at the UN Human Rights Council – the only national humanist group to hold such accreditation – and make interventions there every session. We contribute annually to Humanists International’s Freedom of Thought Report,1 which we are submitting alongside this response; and co-founded the End Blasphemy Laws campaign,2 which has successfully prompted eight countries to repeal their blasphemy laws since it was founded in 2015. IN THIS SUBMISSION In what follows we outline the persecution the non-religious face around the globe, then turn to the inquiry’s specific questions. The bulk of our comments relate to the questions about FoRB as that is where our expertise lies. Throughout we make specific recommendations for change, but in summary, we believe the FCO should do more to oppose the persecution of the non-religious; must take further steps to ensure that its language and agenda is inclusive of the non-religious; and should be able to demonstrate it is raising such issues in its meetings with other governments. 1 The Freedom of Thought Report, Humanists International, <https://fot.humanists.international/>. ​ ​ 2 End Blasphemy Laws campaign, <https://end-blasphemy-laws.org/>. ​ ​ PERSECUTION OF THE NON-RELIGIOUS GLOBALLY ‘In my observations, humanists, when they are attacked, are attacked far more viciously and brutally than in other cases.’ That is the view of Ahmed Shaheed, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, when speaking on the persecution of the non-religious around the globe. We agree, and urge ​ the committee to take time to understand the persecution we face. In addition, we observe that the situation in many places in the world is even worse that one of persecution. The long history of complete suppression of non-religious people means that in many places it is simply not possible to be openly and legally non-religious in the first place. How many non-religious people are there? The number of non-religious people in the world is consistently underestimated and there is simply no reliable data outside of a few European states. The reasons are numerous but mostly it is because admitting to humanist or other non-religious beliefs is either dangerous or socially unacceptable. As former Guardian Middle East correspondent Brian Whitaker has reported, ‘It’s ​ ​ impossible to know how many atheists there are in the region, not least because they often feel a need to keep quiet about their disbelief.’3 This is evident from looking at the numbers. For example, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion has been anonymously downloaded some 13 million times in ​ ​ Arabic,4 but the Arab world, according to Pew figures, has only 1.9 million non-religious people.5 (Two academics, Dr Azim Sharriff and Dr Will Gervais, are in fact currently researching this very issue. Their research is forthcoming, but they have said that: ‘Preliminary data from two nationally representative American samples indicate rates of religious disbelief may be understated — potentially substantially so. Though most recent national self-report estimate the rate of non-belief to be around 11%, using the unmatched count technique — a well-validated method to circumvent response biases — Gervais & Najle (2017) find a much larger number: roughly 26%… [W]e expect that the degree of over-reporting will differ significantly in other countries, and covary systematically with other measures of social pressures reinforcing religious 3 Brian Whitaker, ‘Arabs and atheism: the politics of disbelief’, al-bab.com, 25 February 2019, <https://al-bab.com/blog/2019/02/arabs-and-atheism-politics-disbelief>. ​ ​ 4 Alison Flood, ‘Richard Dawkins to give away copies of The God Delusion in Islamic countries’, The Guardian, ​ ​ 20 March 2018, <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/20/richard-dawkins-to-give-away-copies-of-the-god-del ​ usion-in-islamic-countries>. ​ 5 Figure arrived at by adding up the totals for all the Arab League states. Country Profiles, Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures Project, <http://www.globalreligiousfutures.org/countries>, ​ ​ self-presentation. Since there are different social pressures, and indeed legal requirements, throughout the world, we predict that existing self-reports of theistic beliefs will be most exaggerated in highly religious areas, such as Muslim-majority countries where apostasy remains a capital crime.’6) So there is significant under-reporting of the number of the non-religious – that is how severe the persecution is. Those willing to even say they are non-religious make up a much smaller minority across countries with serious FoRB violations than are Christians. In some countries – like Pakistan, Egypt, Bangladesh, Iraq, and Afghanistan – the population willing to declare they are non-religious is essentially non-existent, and in many others it is very small indeed. There are, as far as we are aware, no members of the Humanist Society Pakistan who are based in Pakistan and are open about their beliefs. As one of their members has told us, ‘There are many vigilante extremists eavesdropping and sniffing on social media for easy targets. Any sort of denial [of Islam] is considered and labeled as heresy in Pakistan. Once someone is accused of being rationalist, agnostic, or atheist in Pakistan, they can be easily murdered by an angry mob or undercover vigilante. ‘Our apprehensions about repression by forces of obscurantism and Islamist terror are not just bombastic rhetoric. The violence and torture meted out to secular and humanist victims is not unsubstantiated.’ Viciousness of persecution This is not an exaggeration. In 2017, Pakistani University student Mashal Khan was murdered by fellow students merely for referring to himself as a humanist on Facebook. He was shot in the head and then beaten to death by a large group of students (some 31 were eventually found culpable with 26 more also tried). Police stood by and watched the attack, saying there were too many people attacking Mashal for them to intervene.7 Some 13 countries have the death penalty for blasphemy or apostasy; a number more have seen people murdered for the same. 40 have prison sentences for blasphemy or apostasy, and 18 more have some other criminal restrictions, meaning 71 have some kind of criminalisation. More generally, some 30 countries are classified by the Freedom of Thought report as guilty of grave violations against the non-religious, with 56 more guilty of severe discrimination, and 100 more of systemic discrimination. Only 10 are deemed to be mostly satisfactory or free and equal.8 6 Dr Azim Shariff, ‘Accurately measuring belief in God around the world’, Understanding Unbelief, <https://research.kent.ac.uk/understandingunbelief/research/early-career-research-projects/accurately-m ​ easuring-belief-in-god-around-the-world/>. ​ 7 ‘“Humanist” murdered by fellow university students for alleged “blasphemy”’, Humanists International, 13 April 2017, <https://humanists.international/2017/04/humanist-murdered-fellow-university-students-alleged-blasphe ​ my/>. ​ 8 Freedom of Thought Report 2018. ​ ​ Some examples of the serious persecution non-religious people have faced include:9 ● In Pakistan, in addition to the Mashal Khan case discussed above, in 2017, Taimoor Raza was ​ sentenced to death after being accused of having made a blasphemous remark in a post on Facebook. Also that year, several humanist bloggers were forcibly disappeared by state security services. Upon release they reported to have been tortured. In 2013, Junaid Hafeez, was arrested and jailed on blasphemy charges, and his lawyer Rashid Rehman was shot dead by vigilantes the following year. No-one has been arrested for this. Further, Gulalai Ismail, the founder of Aware Girls and board member of Humanists International, has faced repeated accusations of blasphemy. For unrelated reasons – to do with her Pashtun rights activism – she has recently been in hiding facing arrest. ● In Bangladesh, there is no death sentence for blasphemy or apostasy. But in 2013, Islamists ​ drew up a ‘hit list’ of 84 humanist bloggers, and began working through it, wantonly murdering people, often hacking them to death with machetes in the streets. Since then this has led to the deaths of Ahmed Rajib Haider, Shafiul Islam, Washiqur Rahman Babu, Avijit Roy, Ananta Bijoy Das, Niloy Neel, and Shazahan Bachchu, amongst others, with more surviving attacks. The Islamists quickly either killed everyone on the list, forced them to seek asylum, or forced them into hiding. The Islamists then became less discriminate in their targets, moving on to murdering others, for example the bloggers’ publishers, LGBT rights activists, and people like Nazimuddin Samad who had simply wrote ‘I have no religion’ on Facebook.
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