Let him perish in the confessional!

Until effective pity will not put you in the confessional

A woman like you no doubt needs a confessional closer at hand.

Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions are the only denominations that benefit from confessional education in the school system.

That meant that protection was also afforded to confessional minorities and to atheists, agnostics or those who were indifferent.

The difficulties experienced in allocating posts to satisfy all ethnic and confessional groups in Iraq points to the considerable challenges ahead, particularly with regard to the constitution making process.

Kazakhstan had created all the conditions needed to revitalize the culture of its population groups, and had established permanent and friendly dialogue between all ethnic and confessional groups living in the country.

The Special Rapporteur also emphasized the importance of establishing an inter confessional permanent dialogue between religious minorities and the Orthodox Church in order to combat all forms of intolerance and religious discrimination.

With regard to parliament, there is no need to follow Lebanon s rigid apportionment of seats according to confessional identity. All the same, Iraq s parliamentary electoral law should be drawn up to take two important factors into account

As a Swiss Foundation, headquartered in Geneva, and as an international, non profit, non confessional, humanitarian NGO (with UN consultative status ECOSOC and UNFPA), WWSF is known for its annual empowerment programs for rural women, children and NGOs.

Sudan a vast, multiethnic, and multi confessional country, established as a political entity by the British in the 1890s is continuing to fray. The emergence, after a prolonged and bloody civil war, of an independent South Sudan in 2011, freed the local Christian and animist population from the Arab Muslim yoke.

To get out of it, greater entry into the economy and politics is needed, but also less demand for quick fix assimilation. All the religions that descend from Abraham have internal mechanisms for change that allow them to reckon with new circumstances in ways that the confessional community can respect.

The United States and France, which have taken the West s lead on Lebanon, have both confirmed the democratic and constitutional nature of the Siniora government. This is true, but only up to a point, for Lebanon s confessional based political system assigns the Shi a, who make up close to 40 of the population, only 21 of parliamentary seats.

Historically, the political ethic of confessional societies has been grounded in a single, basic foundation. In Europe, various kinds of laïque societies have tried to invent themselves out of the ruins of the Christian foundation, but they have made the same mistake in another way, with a kind of Jacobin insistence on the civil religionof the Enlightenment.

Wherever the political and socioeconomic conditions of the short and medium term timelines fail to provide order and stability, the confessional, ethnic, or tribal identities that emerged over the longue durée gain prominence. The extent to which identities are invented matters little, as long as their invocation helps to appropriate elements of history and harness them to current political goals.

Attempts have been made to weaken the sense of national identity of the population of the occupied Syrian Golan by dividing them into Druze and Arab ethnic groups, by encouraging intercommunal religious bigotry in order to drive a confessional wedge into the body of the nation, particularly in the Syrian Arab Republic and Lebanon, and by propagating fabricated stories that denigrate Islam.

In Lebanon s post war parliament, seats are widely distributed among the various confessional communities, so that none feels excluded or fears losing political representation if it loses numerical superiority. In the executive branch, the council of ministers is balanced among Christians and Muslims in order to encourage, indeed force, cooperation and to avoid the risk of domination the fear of oppression by one group.

Iraqi leaders were well aware of the decreased participation in the election by a significant portion of Iraq s multi ethnic and multi confessional mosaic, particularly the Sunni community. Accordingly, they sought out those who were under represented in the Assembly, but whose sense of participation in and ownership of the process was essential, not merely to the constitutional exercise, but to binding the nation s wounds.

In 1997, we witnessed some most unusual procedures introduced in the Working Group. These included the confessional meetings conducted by the two Co Vice Chairmen from January to March 1997, the so called complete picture presented by the then President of the General Assembly in his capacity as the Chairman of the Working Group on 20 March 1997 and the presentation of the distillation of views by the co Vice Chairmen in May 1997.

In support of the implementation of the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief,1 the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, the largest member church in CPC, sponsored an International and Inter confessional Conference on Christian Faith and Human Enmities, held in Moscow, 21 28 June 1994, and attended by denominational and ecumenical leaders from Europe, Asia, the Americas and Africa.

All these three initiatives were taken without any mandate from the Working Group and, in the opinion of many of us, lacked transparency and utility. The so called confessional meetings were apparently conducted in an attempt ostensibly to nullify the main findings of the 1996 report of the Working Group, agreed upon by consensus just three months earlier in September 1996. This was confirmed when the co Vice Chairmen in their report of 10 March 1997 stated