18 ICSA TODAY
rom January 5 to December 31, 2011, I served as
Personal Representative of the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE’s)
Chairman-in-Office on combating racism,
xenophobia, and discrimination and intolerance
against Christians and members of other religions—which
made, at least, for a long business card. I was the third
such representative after the office was established, and
the first scholar—my two predecessors were politicians.
My successors have been an Irish retired judge, in 2012,
and the Ukrainian Ambassador to the Holy See, in 2013.
Headquartered in Vienna, OSCE has 57 participating
states, including the United States, Canada, all the states
of Europe, and those resulting from the collapse of the
Soviet Union, many of which are in fact located in Asia. A
number of nonparticipating states have signed partnership
agreements and maintain embassies to the OSCE in
Vienna. Representatives’ positions are honorary, which,
translated from diplomatic jargon, does not mean that the
representatives only pretend to work, but instead that they
do not receive any monetary compensation.
I regard as the main achievement during my mandate
an OSCE high-level meeting held in Rome on September
12, 2011, on the theme of hate crimes against Christians.
Calling the Rome event a high-level meeting is not a self-
laudatory way of emphasizing its importance. In fact,
high-level meeting is an OSCE technical term to indicate
meetings the organization regards as especially important.
At the concluding OSCE Ministerial Council Meeting for
that year, held in Vilnius on December 6 and 7, 2011, the
Vatican Secretary for the Holy See’s Relation with the
States, Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, mentioned “the
outstanding work” done in 2011 on behalf of religious
liberty, praising especially “last September’s Meeting in
Rome […,] a successful and hopeful event.”
At that meeting, I was instrumental in introducing a three-
stage model of dangers that threaten religious liberty.
First comes intolerance, a cultural phenomenon second,
discrimination, a legal process and third, hate crimes.
The social actors involved in the three steps are obviously
different. But there is a slippery slope from the first step to
the second, and from the second to the third.
After the end of my term as representative of the OSCE,
the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, taking advantage
of my experience at the OSCE, approached me about the
possibility of setting up an Observatory on Religious Liberty
in Italy. The general idea was that the Observatory should
adopt the three-stage model of the Rome conference and
assist Italian diplomacy throughout the world in making
the defense of religious liberty part and parcel of Italian
foreign policy. As a secondary aim, the Observatory’s aim
was to spread awareness in the Italian media of international
religious-liberty problems Because the Observatory was
being promoted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, its aim
was primarily international rather than domestic. However,
one idea was to present the Italian system of cooperation
between the state and several churches and religious
organizations as a possible model for countries in which
democracy and religious liberty were newly introduced.
The Observatory was formally established as a joint venture
between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the City of Rome
in 2012, with the undersigned as chairperson, and four other
members, two of them diplomats and two of them coming
from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) active on
behalf of victims of religious persecution.
We decided to start the activities of our Observatory with the
quite provocative idea of an event about threats to religious
liberty, not in Pakistan or Nigeria—in fact, we addressed
Nigeria in our second public event—but in the United
States. We invited the Catholic Archbishop William Lori of
Baltimore, who presented the documents of the United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops, of which he was the
main architect, about threats to religious liberty in their
country. He described these threats according to the Rome
OSCE model, starting from a general attitude of religious
intolerance in some media and escalating to legal and
administrative discrimination, and to occasional incidents
of violence. Discrimination in the area of conscientious
objections by Christians with respect to laws affecting what
they regard as a non-negotiable view of life and family, and
of free speech, was of particular concern.
The discussion extended to Canada, where in April 2012 the
Roman Catholic Bishops had published a Letter on Freedom
of Conscience and Religion denouncing similar forms of
discrimination, and to Europe. The Canadian Bishops gave as
examples of discrimination that in their country
some colleges of physicians require that members
who refuse to perform abortions refer patients
to another physician willing to do so elsewhere
pharmacists are being threatened by being forced
to have to fill prescriptions for contraceptives or the
F
We decided to start
the activities of our
observatory with the quite
provocative idea of an
event about threats to
religious liberty ...
in the United States.
rom January 5 to December 31, 2011, I served as
Personal Representative of the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE’s)
Chairman-in-Office on combating racism,
xenophobia, and discrimination and intolerance
against Christians and members of other religions—which
made, at least, for a long business card. I was the third
such representative after the office was established, and
the first scholar—my two predecessors were politicians.
My successors have been an Irish retired judge, in 2012,
and the Ukrainian Ambassador to the Holy See, in 2013.
Headquartered in Vienna, OSCE has 57 participating
states, including the United States, Canada, all the states
of Europe, and those resulting from the collapse of the
Soviet Union, many of which are in fact located in Asia. A
number of nonparticipating states have signed partnership
agreements and maintain embassies to the OSCE in
Vienna. Representatives’ positions are honorary, which,
translated from diplomatic jargon, does not mean that the
representatives only pretend to work, but instead that they
do not receive any monetary compensation.
I regard as the main achievement during my mandate
an OSCE high-level meeting held in Rome on September
12, 2011, on the theme of hate crimes against Christians.
Calling the Rome event a high-level meeting is not a self-
laudatory way of emphasizing its importance. In fact,
high-level meeting is an OSCE technical term to indicate
meetings the organization regards as especially important.
At the concluding OSCE Ministerial Council Meeting for
that year, held in Vilnius on December 6 and 7, 2011, the
Vatican Secretary for the Holy See’s Relation with the
States, Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, mentioned “the
outstanding work” done in 2011 on behalf of religious
liberty, praising especially “last September’s Meeting in
Rome […,] a successful and hopeful event.”
At that meeting, I was instrumental in introducing a three-
stage model of dangers that threaten religious liberty.
First comes intolerance, a cultural phenomenon second,
discrimination, a legal process and third, hate crimes.
The social actors involved in the three steps are obviously
different. But there is a slippery slope from the first step to
the second, and from the second to the third.
After the end of my term as representative of the OSCE,
the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, taking advantage
of my experience at the OSCE, approached me about the
possibility of setting up an Observatory on Religious Liberty
in Italy. The general idea was that the Observatory should
adopt the three-stage model of the Rome conference and
assist Italian diplomacy throughout the world in making
the defense of religious liberty part and parcel of Italian
foreign policy. As a secondary aim, the Observatory’s aim
was to spread awareness in the Italian media of international
religious-liberty problems Because the Observatory was
being promoted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, its aim
was primarily international rather than domestic. However,
one idea was to present the Italian system of cooperation
between the state and several churches and religious
organizations as a possible model for countries in which
democracy and religious liberty were newly introduced.
The Observatory was formally established as a joint venture
between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the City of Rome
in 2012, with the undersigned as chairperson, and four other
members, two of them diplomats and two of them coming
from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) active on
behalf of victims of religious persecution.
We decided to start the activities of our Observatory with the
quite provocative idea of an event about threats to religious
liberty, not in Pakistan or Nigeria—in fact, we addressed
Nigeria in our second public event—but in the United
States. We invited the Catholic Archbishop William Lori of
Baltimore, who presented the documents of the United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops, of which he was the
main architect, about threats to religious liberty in their
country. He described these threats according to the Rome
OSCE model, starting from a general attitude of religious
intolerance in some media and escalating to legal and
administrative discrimination, and to occasional incidents
of violence. Discrimination in the area of conscientious
objections by Christians with respect to laws affecting what
they regard as a non-negotiable view of life and family, and
of free speech, was of particular concern.
The discussion extended to Canada, where in April 2012 the
Roman Catholic Bishops had published a Letter on Freedom
of Conscience and Religion denouncing similar forms of
discrimination, and to Europe. The Canadian Bishops gave as
examples of discrimination that in their country
some colleges of physicians require that members
who refuse to perform abortions refer patients
to another physician willing to do so elsewhere
pharmacists are being threatened by being forced
to have to fill prescriptions for contraceptives or the
F
We decided to start
the activities of our
observatory with the quite
provocative idea of an
event about threats to
religious liberty ...
in the United States.
