Mexico City: Amnesty International declares new abortion policy

Amnesty International has adopted a new abortion policy. This was officially declared in the concluding meeting of its Mexico Mission in Mexico City. The reputed Human Rights organization has shed away its “neutral” stance on abortion and will from now onwards openly support its decriminalization and demand access to abortion in cases of rape, incest and danger for the mother’s health or life. The policy change – already discussed in April 2007 - was supported by an overwhelming majority of national AI chapters.

Reacting to the announcement, the Vatican – traditionally a great supporter of AI - urged all Catholic organizations worldwide to withdraw all support for the Human Rights organization.

Mexico City was a suitable place for the declaration. Run by a local progressive government since 1997, this beleaguered island in the world’s second largest Roman Catholic country has legalized abortion in last April – against massive pressure of the Church hierarchy. "No church, no religion can impose its vision of the world in this city," said Victor Hugo Cirigo, leader of the local assembly that voted with great majority for a bill permitting abortion in the first three months. - Cirigo’s Party of the Democratic Revolution is already preparing for another fight with the Roman Catholic Church: it is considering to legalize euthanasia.

Nigeria: Fetish killers dismember Nigerian woman

by Tume Ahemba

Killers in search of body parts to make magic charms hacked up a woman and severely injured two girls on remote farmland in central Nigeria, police said on Wednesday.

Scores of people fled villages in the Oju district of Benue state, near the border with Cameroon, as word of the killing spread, prompting authorities to impose a dusk-to-dawn curfew. "The woman's two ears were cut off, her hands were chopped off, her stomach was ripped open, her heart removed and her vagina was taken away," said a police spokesman from the state capital Makurdi. Two girls who were with the woman also suffered deep machete cuts but survived the attack and are recovering in a local hospital, he added. The attack occurred on August 11, but the report reached state police command only on Tuesday because of poor communications.

Killing for rituals is common in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, where many believe witchcraft involving the use of human organs can make them instant millionaires or provide protection. Nigeria is nominally divided equally between Christians and Muslims, but many mix these imported faiths with traditional beliefs. Sorcerers often use human genitals, eyes, tongues and skulls to make charms.

Spain: Breaking the moral monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church

by Fernando Robles

With the new school year starting in September, children in Spain will have a new secular civics class that has the Roman Catholic Church up in arms. “Education for citizenship” will include ethics, civics and human rights. Based on the values enshrined in the 1978 Constitution, it is designed to prepare students in public elementary and junior high schools to become self-determined, responsible and tolerant citizens of a modern, pluralistic democracy.

The Roman Catholic Church (RCC) has taken the course as a challenge against its moral monopoly and launched a furious campaign against it. The Episcopate alarmed Catholic parents that the civics classes violated their constitutional right to decide about the “moral formation” of their children and had to be fought by all legal means. The archbishop of Madrid threatened to appeal to the Constitutional Court of Spain to stop this “ethical-moral educational program that negates religion". But the government is not impressed. “No faith can impose itself on the law”, said Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in a speech on a youth congress last month. "Spain is a lay country, and its lay principles guarantee pluralism and tolerance".

Most explosive about the new program is for the bishops the fact that it includes – among many other things - issues of gender, sexuality and family. One of its stated goals is to teach children to reject "existing discrimination for reason of sex, origin, social differences, affective-sexual, or whatever other type" and to exercise a "critical evaluation of the social and sexual division of labor and racist, xenophobic, sexist, and homophobic social prejudices.” According to the bishops, this is “indoctrinating children with the sexual ideology and social agenda of the left” – in short: “Sodom and Gomorrah!”

When the socialist government took office in March 2004, it changed – much to the chagrin of the RCC - the social climate in Spain with a series of new politics. It scrapped plans for compulsory religious classes in public schools, cut down government subsidies for Catholic institutions, eased the laws for divorce and abortion and recognized gay marriages. Despite the archbishop’s outcry that Madrid had now become “Sodom and Gomorrah”, Zapatero's liberal social model enjoys wide support among the people. In a July survey by the Center for Sociological Research in Madrid, more than two thirds of respondents welcomed, for example, the legalization of gay marriages, though 77 percent described themselves as Catholics (of which, however, only 16 percent said they went to church every week, while 55 percent almost never).

The influence of the RCC is waning in the once most Catholic country in Europe. The education system is still one of its strongholds: about one quarter of the country's children are educated in Catholic schools that get about half their funding from the state and the other half from non-government sources. But even among students and parents represented by the Catholic Association of Private Education Companies in Madrid, 94 percent don’t have any objection to the civics classes. In fact, the furious resistance of the Catholic bishops against the new syllabus threatens to backfire. The government seems to wait that time ripens to put the RCC in its place.

The man behind the new civics program is Gregorio Peces-Barba Martínez, Professor of Legal Philosophy at Madrid University and one of the authors of the Constitution of 1978. In an article in the Spanish daily El Pais, he warned the noisy bishops not to “pull so hard on the rope”. Criticising them for their “extreme arrogance, a sensation of impunity and an insufferable sense of superiority, derived from the fact that they administer 'superior truths'”, he accused them of “defying the legitimate authorities, the Constitution and the law, attempting to impose their criteria before the common good and the popular sovereignty residing in the Parliament” and held them “responsible for the agitation that impedes social peace”. If the RCC was not able to adjust itself to the new social climate in the next legislature, he concluded, “it would be necessary to address the topic of the actions and situation of the Church and establish a new status, that puts them in their place and that respects the autonomy of the civil authority.” Prof. Peces-Barba's statements are considered significant because of his influence in Spain's government.

Norway: European Human Rights Court rules against mandatory religious classes

Finally, Norway has to withdraw compulsory religious classes in public schools. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled on 27 June 2007 that the so-called KRL classes (Christian, religious and life stance education”) violated Article 2 of the European Human Rights convention. Education Minister Øystein Djupedal announced that necessary changes were being prepared.

The ruling ends ten years of legal battle. In 1997, when compulsory religious education in the lines of the "State's official religion" for all students of primary and secondary schools was reestablished in Norway, seven families decided to sue the state as their children were forced to participate against their wishes in religious classes and there was no way to exempt them. They lost their case at the local, appeals and Supreme Court levels, but four of them did not stop there and appealed in Strasbourg in 2002. “We did not think that our boys would be old enough to drink champagne by the time this case was decided!” exclaimed one of the plaintiffs, whose son had been a 10-years-old boy back in 1997, whom she wanted to spare religious indoctrination.

There is no separation of church and state in Norway. Schools are bound by the General Christian-aim clause and the powerful Evangelical Lutheran State Church has a dominant position in the curriculum. Therefore it was difficult to accommodate minority groups with other religious rights by only offering Christian KRL classes, noted the court.

Norway stands accused of yet another violation of Human Rights due to State Church privileges enshrined in its Constitution. The Norwegian Constitution demands that any elected government has to present a cabinet with 50 % of the ministers being members of the State Church. This is violating both the United Nations Convention on Civil and Political Rights and the European Council's Human Rights Convention.