The Case of FECRIS

The Case of FECRIS

Fédération européenne des centres de recherche et d’information sur le sectarisme (European Federation of Centres of Research and Information on Cultism)

FECRIS, founded in 1994, brings together the militant anti-cult and anti-religious movements of various European countries, such as UNADFI in France.

This federation has, despite the opposition of several members of the parliamentary assembly (see Mr Vis’s argument, below), obtained in 2005 a participatory status with the Council of Europe. This status means that these movements, which make a cult of intolerance, of defamation and of hatred, are consulted on questions relating to spiritual minorities. It should be known, for example, that FECRIS’s Serbian representative at the time of this request was the specialist, under Slobodan Milosevic’s regime, in the indoctrination of the Serbian soldiers who practised “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo 7.

FECRIS is not, by the mediocrity of the groups it assembles, a reliable source of information and reflection on the phenomenon of spiritual minorities. Its status with the Council of Europe is dramatic for Human Rights and confirms to us the necessity of creating an independent observatory of spiritual minorities.

Note by Mr Rudolf Vis, member of the Parliamentary Assembly. Argument against granting FECRIS consultative status with the Council of Europe

FECRIS (Fédération européenne des centres de recherche et d’information sur le sectarisme) was founded in 1994, and covers the whole body of national “anti-religious” groups of various European countries. The message disseminated by FECRIS essentially targets newly created and minority religious groupings, which FECRIS regularly qualifies, in a pejorative manner, as “cults”.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe rose against such a denomination in its Resolution 1412 (1), and this position was reinforced by the declarations of the Committee of Ministers (2). However, in spite of the Council of Europe’s position, FECRIS has continued to use this formulation. On its website, in a section entitled “Meeting with lawyers in 2001”, the term “cult” is used some sixty times. This approach, and other methods of FECRIS (which we set out in detail below), aim at and effectively lead to a process of conflation, of isolation and of discrimination with regard to small religious groups, and, generally speaking, to an attitude of intolerance towards them on the part of society as a whole.

One of the most reprehensible actions of certain representatives of groups belonging to FECRIS is a technique named “deprogramming”: this consists in kidnapping people and using force against them, by various means — including physical violence — in order to compel them to renounce their “faith”. This type of method is not only unlawful, but has also been denounced by the European Court of Human Rights (case No. 37680/97, linked to the Vice-president of FECRIS (Rosa-Maria Boladeras, of Spanish nationality — see the more detailed account below).

Independently of this extreme recourse to force which abduction constitutes (and which aims, therefore, to compel a person to abandon her religion), the groups belonging to FECRIS scarcely concern themselves with evaluating in a balanced manner the religion taken as a target: quite the contrary, they disseminate false information in order to trouble people’s minds.

Consequently, one cannot consider that FECRIS plays a sufficiently useful role to be able to benefit from consultative status; and everything indicates, over many years, that this organisation has no intention whatever of modifying its approach. All the studies carried out on this subject show that FECRIS and its members very rarely — indeed never — publish credible and serious documents founded on objective work; on the other hand, their bias is constant.

In certain countries, FECRIS and its affiliated groups have succeeded in having their negative message about religious movements disseminated by certain media. Rather than creating a climate of tolerance and understanding, these organisations have contributed to creating a phenomenon which can only be described as “hysterical” in this context. France is notably one of the countries where FECRIS and its members have succeeded in creating a climate of extreme intolerance with regard to religious movements.

If FECRIS were authentically concerned with the defence of human rights and the reuniting of families, it would be entirely sensible to engage with it in a democratic process of traditional conflict resolution. The promotion of dialogue would be one of its principal forms. But FECRIS’s members do not seek a constructive resolution of the problems linked to the people they describe as “victims”; in other words, they do not seek to establish a dialogue with the groupings they designate under the name of “cults”.

Common sense requires that two parties in conflict be brought together to find the solution to their problem together.

That is precisely the approach adopted by other organisations, such as INFORM (3) and the OSCE (4), or again by the Swedish Parliament’s report on religious minorities (5) — one of whose major points is to say that ”(…) nothing must be done that could widen the gap between religious movements and the rest of the community. Quite the contrary, society must assist dialogue and conflict resolution”.

For its part, FECRIS does not have recourse to these simple and fundamental instruments which make it possible to establish relations; in its description of the movements targeted, it opts rather for sensationalism and discrimination, so that it erects a barrier between the family concerned and the other parties.

But the element which perhaps most clearly illustrates the frontal opposition between FECRIS’s objectives and the Council of Europe’s principles is the position taken by FECRIS on the subject of the French About-Picard Act. The Council of Europe expressed keen concerns about this legislative text, and recently published a resolution inviting the French government to revise the legislation in question (6).

By contrast, FECRIS and its members have, by their own admission, deployed considerable efforts to bring this law into being. Furthermore, while other governments, major churches and human rights defence groups were protesting against the persecution of religious minorities by the Chinese authorities, FECRIS gave active support to China so that that country should adopt a law inspired by French legislation in this field.

Consequently, in the light of all these facts and of other points raised below, one must consider that it is not legitimate to grant consultative status to FECRIS. As we have already demonstrated, and as we shall show again, more precisely, FECRIS is a pressure group which has specific ambitions, and which conceals itself behind a façade of an objective advisory organisation.

Detailed analysis of the facts relating to FECRIS:

We have carried out a comparative analysis of FECRIS’s official aims and of the established actions of its members.

The first objective claimed by FECRIS is the following:

“To bring together representative European associations concerned by certain current organisations of a cult and totalitarian nature — whether they have a legal existence or not — and whose practices constitute a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, and of European and national laws.”

Now, certain groups belonging to FECRIS have themselves been accused and found guilty of violating human rights!

We give below two significant examples concerning a Spanish movement belonging to FECRIS: AIS/Pro Juventud, whose director — Maria-Rosa Boladeras — is also vice-president of FECRIS.

First case: in 1999, in the framework of a judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (case no. 37680/97 — Riera Blume v. Spain) relating to a “deprogramming” affair, it was established that the anti-religious group AIS/Pro Juventud had had “a direct and immediate responsibility”.

Second case, dating from 1995: this same group, directed by Maria-Rosa Boladeras (AIS/Pro Juventud), had abducted a young man of the Catholic religion, M. Canals. An attempt had been made to deprogram the latter in a psychiatric hospital where he had been confined under duress — which constituted a violation of his fundamental rights. This incident was then denounced by Cardinal Ruiz, attached to the Vatican, who asserted that there was nothing reprehensible about the religious grouping of which M. Canals was a part. The Spanish court which judged the affair was to declare: “Under the pretext of a mental illness invented out of whole cloth, an adult citizen has been deprived of liberty on the sole ground of his religious faith; those responsible attempted to confer on their act the appearance of legality — which constitutes a flagrant violation of our laws… It is obvious that M. Santiago Canals Coma suffers from no disorder that could justify his being declared mentally incapable, and it is therefore appropriate to guarantee his right to freedom of worship, enshrined in article 16 of the Spanish Constitution, and most particularly in article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights”

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One could cite still other cases in various European countries, where groupings belonging to FECRIS have likewise been convicted by the courts for the same type of human rights violation.

FECRIS’s second objective is the following:

“To represent the member associations before the European institutions, for the defence of families, of individuals and of democratic societies faced with the activities of reprehensible cult organisations.”

Again, we shall illustrate by the following examples FECRIS’s action with regard to “families, individuals and democratic societies”.

Through the dissemination of false and negative information in the media and other outlets about religious groupings which FECRIS describes as “cults”, a certain social climate has been created, leading to a cruel and discriminatory treatment of the members of these groups. The following examples show that numerous people have found themselves in difficulty in their workplace and in their family, in so far as they have been considered “different”, indeed “dangerous”, on account of the propaganda disseminated about them. It should moreover be pointed out that specialists in religious questions have an opinion radically different from that expressed by FECRIS and its members.

It is obvious that no one may shelter behind religious motives to violate the law, and that any offence committed by this or that member of a religious movement must be prosecuted as in the case of any citizen. But total confusion is created if one proceeds — as is often the case — to conflate the acts of an individual with the objectives or the overall policy of the group of which he is a part. In this way, FECRIS feeds prejudices with regard to groups it describes as “cults” and brings about discrimination against these groups and each of their members.

One could truly cite several hundred examples; we have appended a few of them to the present document, and one may obtain information about numerous other cases on request. All these affairs reveal the effects of the discrimination practised against ordinary people who are members of small religious groups. Some of these people have lost their jobs, have been refused employment or the signing of a commercial contract, have been subjected to unacceptable investigations, have seen their children refused admission to nursery schools or children’s associations (such as girl guide movements), or again expelled from such establishments or movements; and one could mention many other consequences besides.

Moreover, as we have already mentioned above, a new anti-religious law was adopted in France under pressure from French groups belonging to FECRIS (a process mentioned in the report of the meeting of European lawyers of 9 June 2001). This French law has been denounced by human rights defence movements such as the International Helsinki Federation; and, at a very recent date, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe reached the following conclusion, in its Resolution 1309 (2002) entitled Freedom of religion and religious minorities in France:

The Assembly invites the French government to review the law in question and to clarify the definition of the terms “offence” and “perpetrator of the offence”.

The Assembly invites the governments of the member States to use the normal procedures of criminal and civil law against illegal practices carried on in the name of groups of a religious, esoteric or spiritual character.

As we have already emphasised in our Introduction, another element concerning FECRIS and contradicting this federation’s official objective of “defending democratic societies” is the fact that representatives of FECRIS, and of its French affiliated group, the CCMM (“Centre de Documentation, d’Education et d’Action contre les manipulations mentales”), took part in an “anti-cult” conference in Beijing in November 2000. On their return from China, the CCMM’s representatives published a newsletter containing two pages of propaganda from the Chinese authorities about the religious movement persecuted in China, “Falun Gong”, and “explaining” the “cult” nature of this Chinese movement; finally, this newsletter gave total support to the Chinese government in its action against cults”.

This visit to China took place after the revelation of considerable persecutions of local religious minorities by the Chinese authorities. Members of the “Falun Gong” movement had already been tortured, imprisoned and placed in psychiatric hospitals without having committed any other “offence” than the practice of their religion. Information testifying to numerous deaths caused by the treatment inflicted by the Chinese authorities on members of the Falun Gong group had already been supplied by organisations such as Amnesty International. These acts of violence had been strongly denounced by most Western countries and by the major human rights defence organisations, which had most particularly emphasised the brutal character of these treatments; on the other hand, there has been no condemnation on the part of FECRIS or the CCMM: quite the contrary, these organisations have disseminated Chinese propaganda in this field and have taken part in the conference against “cults” which we have just mentioned. For their part, the Chinese authorities very warmly welcomed the French delegation and declared that France constituted a model in this field.

In summary, FECRIS and one of its affiliated groups have approved the action of a country — China — which very actively represses religious minorities. The violence perpetrated by China against the country’s religious minorities has brought about suffering, deaths and the disintegration of certain families — facts of which little has yet been said — in total violation of the Council of Europe’s fundamental principles.

FECRIS’s third objective is the following:

“To alert the public authorities and international institutions in the event of condemnable activities”.

The groups belonging to FECRIS have certainly contributed (when they have not been the principal actors in the matter) to creating a negative public image of certain movements to which they have attached the label of “cults”, and have relied on this process to “alert” the media and the public authorities.

In the opinion of eminent specialists in religious questions, such as Mikael Rothstein of the University of Copenhagen and Dr Bryan Wilson, Professor emeritus at the University of Oxford, the anti-religious groups engage in exaggerations and do not give a faithful image of the movements they describe as “cults”. Such “false alerts” may have — and effectively do have, in certain cases — devastating effects on individual members of these movements and on the movements themselves.

The two following examples are manifest proof of it.

In 1993, in France, assaults were carried out against the premises and homes, in Lyon and Marseille, of a small Christian grouping — called “The Family”; more than 200 police officers took part, breaking the front doors with axes, and armed with automatic rifles. The parents of the families in question were handcuffed in front of their children. This action by the French public authorities followed accusations formulated by ADFI, a French anti-religious organisation (and member of FECRIS). For several years, ADFI had, without any foundation, accused “the Family” of violence against children, of prostitution and of other unlawful activities. Six years after the police assault, the Court of Aix-en-Provence established that the allegations had no foundation, and dismissed the case. All the accused were declared not guilty and acquitted. ADFI has never presented any apology for the suffering and unhappiness thus caused to numerous families, and has never taken steps to retract the false information it had disseminated.

Moreover, in 1992, a man by the name of Jean Migueres, founder of a group named “CEIRUS”, was shot dead in the middle of the street. The perpetrator of the murder was his father-in-law — who had been informed of the victim’s “suspect” activities by the Lyon branch of ADFI. The latter had classified the CEIRUS group in the category of “dangerous cults”. The CEIRUS group and M. Jean Migueres had never been convicted of criminal activities; and yet, even after the publication in the press of the news of M. Migueres’s assassination, ADFI’s president publicly continued his attacks against the latter, and continued to declare that the victim was a “dangerous and harmful personality” — without any consideration for M. Migueres’s widow and family.

FECRIS’s fourth objective is the following:

“To take part in the creation of a European legal area in matters of cult questions”.

As regards the study of a possible participation of FECRIS in the European legal area, it is very important to examine this body’s role in the elaboration of the French law — which has been the object of numerous criticisms — on “cult movements”.

As we have already emphasised, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe judged that this law was scarcely satisfactory and invited the French government to revise it. The legislative text in question authorises the courts to dissolve any group (or to convict any group leader) found guilty of several offences, and this even if these offences have no relation with the religious principles the group in question defends. As we have also mentioned above, FECRIS has claimed a certain credit for the elaboration of this law, declaring notably: “It is a very important law which was able to be adopted in particular thanks to the action of associations which combat cults”.

Eminent human rights defence organisations have issued keen criticisms of this law. Thus, the International Helsinki Federation made the following declaration:

“A certain number of religious groupings and civil rights defence associations have expressed their concern about the French bill against cults. If a State does indeed have the duty to protect its citizens from the excesses of members of certain groups or associations, this must not be done at the price of discrimination — which is the case as regards the French bill. The excesses or abuses in question must fall under the Penal Code, indeed under other legislative texts, but must certainly not be the object of a specific law targeting religious minorities. Such a law would open the way to abuses on the part of the public authorities, who could render themselves guilty of violations of freedom of worship and of association, notably through the dismantling of peaceful religious minorities”.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe immediately commissioned a study on the subject (cf. Doc. 8560, entitled “Freedom of religion and religious minorities in France”), where one may read this:

“This law seems directed against religious minorities, which are pejoratively described as “cults” in the bill. The Assembly, which has recently studied this phenomenon (its work led to the adoption, in June 1999, of Recommendation 1412), denounces this attitude with regard to religious minorities and urgently invites the member States not to employ such discriminatory terms).

Now, the term “cult” is widely used by FECRIS throughout its document entitled “Meeting of European lawyers, 9 June 2001”. The word “cult” is employed some sixty times in seven pages. It has a pejorative connotation, in so far as it designates groups considered as “dangerous” by FECRIS. The latter has concentrated all its objectives on a notion which has no legal existence, which the organisation in question does not take the trouble to define, but which it uses as the foundation of a campaign in favour of major legislative reforms in this field throughout Europe. Now, the adoption of legislation relating to a poorly defined category (and which, for that reason, could apply to any group corresponding to the preconceptions of officials, lawyers and judges) would risk leading to arbitrary powers such that fundamental human rights would certainly be threatened.

The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, quite recently (on 21 September 2001), placed itself in opposition to this type of law in its replies to two recommendations adopted by the Parliamentary Assembly (1412 and 1396), replies in which it clearly indicates its position on religious minorities. The Committee of Ministers declares that the following elements should be taken into consideration:

(1) it is appropriate to emphasise and to affirm that a State wishing to deal with the problem of religious minorities must respect freedom of religion, the principle of non-discrimination and all the other principles of human rights protection enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights.

(2) it is appropriate to agree, in a very clear manner, that there is no need for specific laws on groups of a religious, spiritual or esoteric character, in so far as any illegal practice carried on in this field falls under the ordinary procedures of criminal law and civil law.

(3) the proposal to create a “European Observatory” relating to minority confessions must be declined — and this because considerable resources would be necessary to guarantee reliable and objective information on the religions in question.

Let us cite one more example which illustrates well FECRIS’s current orientation. The German organisation AGPF, a member of FECRIS, and represented by Mr Ingo Heinemann — one of this body’s principal officers and a member of FECRIS’s council — has publicly declared on the Internet that the criterion of “anti-religious discrimination” should be excluded from the field of application, by the various EU countries, of the European Directive on equal treatment in employment (2000/43/EG, 2000/78/EG), in so far as such an element could lead to “abuses” (one may obtain information on this subject on the AGPF site’s home page).

Moreover, the Swiss organisation SADK, also a member of FECRIS, likewise illustrates the direction in which one would go if FECRIS were to take part in the elaboration of laws. Indeed, in a letter addressed to politicians, SADK asked for the elaboration of laws authorising the placing in isolation, for periods of up to 30 days, of cult members — removing them, against their will, from the group of which they are a part. One sees clearly that this type of law, which would be founded on the rejection of the religious beliefs of others, is the opposite of the principles of a democracy worthy of the name.

FECRIS’s fifth objective is the following:

“To create an international information network”

The home page of FECRIS’s website indicates that this organisation cooperates with four international groups. The first group mentioned — and the most renowned in this context — is the AFF (“American Family Foundation”). The AFF played a major role in the creation of FECRIS by sponsoring a conference held in Barcelona in 1993, where FECRIS was conceived. Moreover the AFF probably derives its notoriety from its partnership with CAN (“Cult Awareness Network”), a group based in Chicago and dissolved in 1996, following a trial which awarded damages of 5 million dollars to a plaintiff who had brought proceedings for unlawful abduction and attempted “deprogramming” on the part of CAN’s members.

For more than twenty years, the AFF had recourse to the services of an American psychiatrist by the name of Louis “Jolly” West. The latter had made a reputation around the important experiments he had carried out on LSD, and by his declarations at the time of the explosion of violence in the American ghettos towards the end of the 1960s. Louis West had then made himself the champion of castration by chemical means, and of the implantation of electrodes in the brain with a view to influencing violent behaviour and political protest.

From the 1980s onwards, this American psychiatrist had trained anti-religious Europeans in the “deprogramming” of individuals. Among his disciples, the Spanish psychiatrist and FECRIS member Josep Jansa, and Enrique Sagnier Sagues.

These “deprogramming” actions are entirely questionable — to say no more. Mr Enrique Sagnier Sagues took part in the aborted attempt to deprogram M. Canals in 1995 (see above). This affair was condemned not only by the courts, but also by Cardinal Ruiz, in post at the Vatican, who declared that it was totally erroneous to describe M. Canals’s group as a “cult” — a Christian movement which appeared to him perfectly acceptable.

FECRIS’s sixth objective is the following:

“To carry out research on the legal aspect of “cult deviances”.”

One may have serious concerns about this concept of “cult deviance”, formulated by FECRIS.

Indeed, if one analyses the remarks of another Vice-President of FECRIS — the Austrian Friedrich Griess, in a work devoted to cults — one may be very seriously alarmed. Mr Griess writes notably this: “Cult members are, 80% of them, primitive and stupid”, or again: “These people are more and more imbecilic, and one can easily guess, a kilometre away, that they are cult members”.

One may find yet another very significant example of this scarcely scientific and intolerant approach in the writings of M. Roger Ikor, founder of the CCMM (Centre de Documentation, d’Education et d’Action contre les manipulations mentales), a French organisation belonging to FECRIS.

In a work entitled “Le livre des rationalistes”, M. Ikor writes notably:

Let us now consider the problem of indoctrination. Let us admit that this or that individual is a visionary: that, in fact, is not sufficient to be capable of creating a cult; or, at the very least, it is not sufficient for the development of a cult. In reality, in principle the intervention of a more expert person is needed. Thus, Moses was assisted by Aaron. The philosophy of Jesus Christ was exploited by St Paul (certainly after Jesus’s death, but no matter). Only Muhammad is, it seems, a different case in so far as he succeeded in bringing together the qualities of visionary and of expert. Moreover, this was also the case with Hitler. Indeed, there is no difference of nature — or rather of philosophy — between a cult and a religion. If one were in the least serious, one would put an end not only to all the absurdities which surround cults, but also to the great religions themselves.

M. Roger Ikor also declared to the press:

“We must eliminate the cults which proliferate on the basis of our decline. When there are enough people who destroy the very foundation of the cults, the public authorities will perhaps react”.

One can hardly bring into harmony these messages relating to “cult deviances” and the inaugural address of Mr Walter Schwimmer, Secretary General of the Council of Europe, at a conference on religious dialogue in 2002. In this address, Mr Schwimmer emphasised notably the importance of a true empathy with regard to others, including their religious choices and convictions, however different these may be.

A large part of the information supplied by FECRIS on the subject of “cult behaviours” is quite simply false and very partisan — even if this organisation attempts to create a polemic by disseminating its message as it stands in the media, that is to say without any commentary. The Danish scholar Mikael Rothstein, historian of religions at the University of Copenhagen, recently declared this:

“All the researchers specialising in the study of this type of conflict (namely historians and sociologists of religion, social psychologists, jurists, etc.) agree in saying that the description that the “anti-religious” movements give of the new religions is erroneous. The realities they describe in this field quite simply have no existence”.

Summary

The first criterion which must be satisfied is to know whether the action of this or that grouping constitutes a complement to the activities of the Council of Europe — in conformity with the European Convention on Human Rights.

On the basis of all these arguments, one may say in conclusion that FECRIS has an action not only non-conforming, but, in fact, totally contrary to the activities and to the norms of the Council of Europe in matters of human rights, and that FECRIS is not a reliable source of information about the new religious movements (which it describes, in a pejorative manner, as “cults”). Consequently, FECRIS does not meet the criteria necessary for the granting of consultative status with the Council of Europe.

Criticisms during the debate on the granting of FECRIS’s status

Read the results of the debate on the granting of consultative status to FECRIS

1 Illegal activities of cults, Recommendation 1412 (1999), Doc. 9220 21, September 2001

2

Reply of the Committee of Ministers, adopted at the 765th meeting of the Ministers’ Deputies (19 September 2001)

3 An independent British grouping, but supported by the London government, which supplies non-partisan and objective information on religious movements; in the search for dialogue, INFORM also endeavours to bring together the parties in conflict.

4 Cf. the OSCE Supplementary Meeting on Freedom of Belief and Worship (22 March 1999).

5 Report entitled “In good faith: Society and the new religious movements”, 1998: 113.

6 Resolution 1309 (2002): “Freedom of religion and religious minorities in France ”.

7 Patricia Duval, Lawyer specialising in Human Rights - Paris, France 11-07-2005