Human rights are about a fair balance — our freedom of religion is not absolute
HOW SEPARATE should religious communities be from the rest of society? There is no easy answer. I think most people would agree it is important to protect religious practices but that shouldn’t become a licence to operate with impunity. Where we draw that line has become one of the most urgent questions of our times.
It is against this background that a stand-off has developed between Ofsted and the Charedi community. This is “about freedom of religion”, wrote community spokesperson Chaya Spitz in last week’s JC, “and it needs to be brought to an end”. Ofsted’s report into Yesodey Hatorah makes for interesting reading. Textbooks were extensively redacted to remove references to reproduction or images of women’s skin. Most worryingly, the school restricted access to guidance about how to keep safe in the world, including blacking out the telephone numbers of safeguarding helplines. Freedom of religion is protected in law and rightly so. Those who created human rights laws in the late 1940s and early 1950s, including Jewish jurists, had direct experience of the Nazi abuse of religious communities. Many of the protected rights were designed to prevent state-sanctioned discrimination exemplified by the Nuremberg Laws. Human rights can be an effective shield for religious communities. But freedom of religion is only one in a set of protected rights. And that’s where Ms Spitz gets it wrong. A human rights-based society is not about building unbreakable walls around communities. It is about creating a fair balance between competing rights. That’s why the right to freedom of religion isn’t absolute — it can be interfered with if that interference is proportionate and has a legitimate aim, such as the protection of the rights of children. Ofsted’s approach has shifted for a good reason. Scandals over child abuse, in the Catholic Church, over Jimmy Savile and indeed within the Orthodox community, have meant communities which have avoided external scrutiny are being more closely monitored. This isn’t just about religion. Anyone who works with children will know how important safeguarding has become.
It is worrying that a senior representative of the Charedi community sees Ofsted’s work as unfair victimisation, in the context of a school where children were being deliberately prevented from accessing external child protection services. Who are the real victims here?
There are important issues at stake here over the extent to which religious communities should educate children in a way which doesn’t entirely insulate them from modern society, and also how not to make raising educational standards seem like an attack on religion itself. Ultimately, we should aim to interfere with religious rights as little as possible while ensuring the rights of children are protected.
Achieving that fair balance should be a joint priority of both Ofsted and the Charedi community.
Adam Wagner is a barrister and the founder of RightsInfo.org