Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the witnesses. I do not propose to repeat the pertinent questions asked by Deputy Brendan Smith.

Many lessons from history can be utilised in this regard. In his human rights campaign Martin Luther King held up to the white population of America the Constitution of the United States when he called on them to implement constitutional rights for all the country's citizens. This approach is better than telling people to be better or not to do this or that. We must hold people to account by asking them legitimate questions based on the conflict between their actions and that to which they signed up. The lesson from history is that this is the correct approach.

It is good to see Mr. Turner again. The most recent example of the type of scenario I describe was in the agreement on the Helsinki Final Act in 1973. During the negotiations, the Soviet Union sought certainty by demanding recognition for the post-war borders of central and eastern Europe. There were three aspects to the negotiations. The first was the recognition and finalisation of borders, in particular, the division of Germany and its internal border. Agreement was reached on this issue. The second issue was economic and social matters and the third was human rights. In the case of human rights, the Soviet Union, which was the first atheist state in the world, signed up to a declaration of religious freedom for Soviet citizens. It was on the basis of this declaration that those who favoured allowing Jews to emigrate confronted the Soviet authorities. They noted the contradiction between the persecution experienced by Jews in the Soviet Union, which was similar to the persecution the witnesses have described, and the country's public statements on religious freedom, and asked why the government was acting in conflict with the principles it proclaimed.

I am not an expert in this area and I do not know if the European Parliament or other parliaments have taken any action in this area. The joint committee has available to it a professional diplomat from the Department of Foreign Affairs. If an Irish ambassador were called to the Parliament of Iran to answer questions on the reasons Irish people were behaving in a manner that contradicted agreements Ireland had signed, it would have greater substance than simply inviting him or her to a meeting to be scolded. If possible, the joint committee should invite ambassadors from certain countries before it to explain their failure to uphold the values they have subscribed to in official declarations and commitments, including in the United Nations. This would be preferable to giving out to people and would give us some credibility.

It is clear from the presentations that the main problem is the persecution of Christians. As Diarmaid MacCulloch's masterful history of Christianity demonstrates, Christians lived in the areas where persecution is currently taking place long before St. Patrick arrived in Ireland. They were in a majority in these regions for centuries before Islam arrived on the scene and are part and parcel of the culture of these parts of the world. Christianity in those regions is distinct from subsequent attempts by Christianity to convert people in other regions of the world, pre-communist China being the classic example.

Religious freedom is a fundamental human right - the right to believe or not believe has to be a fundamental right. I can see where there would be tensions because of proselytisation or missionaries, on the one hand, as distinct from historic groups who have always been Christian. While I would not make a distinction between them, I think they will evoke different types of attitudes. If we are to take the very clear focus of the persecution of Christianity, which is now, as Bishop McAreavey has said, the highest in the world of any religion, can the committee be provided with information, from the vast amount of work that the witnesses have done, about how specific countries that have signed up to a set of international standards have breached those standards? Then we can explore the possibility of inviting in representatives of those countries, if they are here in this country, and outlining the conflict between what was signed up for and what is happening on the ground, specifically about Christians, because this is about Christian persecution. I think in that respect, this committee, as one of the 28 member states of the European Union, could do that. That ambassador will have to file a report back to his government. It will go back into foreign affairs. There will be a paper trail.