Posted on by Mark Movsesian

“Liberation” and Ethnic Cleansing

Following on yesterday’s Legal Spirits podcast, I was interviewed today by GB News on UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s appalling statement about Azerbaijan’s “liberation” last year of Nagorno-Karabakh. In fact, Baku ethnically cleansed Karabakh of its 120,000 Christian Armenian inhabitants a year ago, in violation of an order from the International Court of Justice, which ruled that Baku was violating the international anti-racism treaty, and in defiance of a statement from the US that ethnic cleansing would not be tolerated. Well, listeners to the podcast will know my skepticism about international human rights law, which seems to matter only when great powers think it’s in their interest. But statements like Lammy’s are outrageous and incomprehensible.

You can listen to the GB News report at the link below:

Posted on by L&R Forum

Legal Spirits 063: Ethnic Cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh, One Year Later

Ganzdasar Monastery, a 13th Century Armenian Christian site in Nagorno-Karabakh (Wikipedia)

In September 2023, in violation of an order from the International Court of Justice, Azerbaijan ethnically cleansed the region of Nagorno-Karabakh of its 120,000 Christian Armenian inhabitants. In this episode, human-rights attorney Karnig Kerkonian describes the events of a year ago and efforts to hold Azerbaijan responsible in international forums. He also explains the role that religion, understood as a communal and cultural marker, has had in Azerbaijan’s campaign against Christian Armenians. Listen in.

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Posted on by Mark Movsesian

St. John’s University Panel on Karabakh Next Week

For anyone interested, I’ll be appearing (virtually) this coming Wednesday, November 1, on a panel St. John’s University is sponsoring on the ethnic cleansing of Armenian Christians from Karabakh: “Understanding theNagorno-Karabakh Conflict & Ongoing Humanitarian Crisis.” I’ll join Anna Hess Sargsyan of the Austrian Center for Peace and Artyom Tonoyan of Hamline University. Details below:

Posted on by L&R Forum

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

  • In Fellowship of Christian Athletes v. San Jose Unified School District Board of Education, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting en banc, held that Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) is entitled to a preliminary injunction requiring the school district to restore recognition to FCA chapters as student clubs. The school district revoked FCA’s recognition as a club because FCA requires its officers to affirm a Statement of Faith and abide by a sexual purity policy, which the 9th Circuit said violated the club’s Free Exercise and Free Speech rights.
  • In Catholic Healthcare International, Inc. v. Genoa Charter Township, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a Michigan federal district court to enter a preliminary injunction that will allow a Catholic healthcare organization to restore a Stations of the Cross prayer trail as well as a stone altar and mural after Genoa Township zoning officials insisted that the Prayer Trail should be treated as a church for zoning purposes. Plaintiffs argued that the zoning ordinance as applied to them violates RLUIPA, and the 6th Circuit agreed.
  • In Damiano v. Grants Pass School District, two Oregon educators filed their opening brief in the 9th Circuit after a federal district court ruled against them. The educators were terminated after they voiced their opinions online about gender identity education policy solutions, rooted in their religious beliefs, which they claim violated their Free Exercise and Free Speech rights.
  • In Virden v. Crawford County, Arkansas, the Western District of Arkansas denied plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction after the Crawford County Library System implemented a policy removing books with LGBTQ+ themes from the children’s sections of the libraries. Plaintiffs claim this violates the Establishment Clause because the policy was implemented due to pressure from religious objectors. However, the court left open the possibility of a narrower injunction later on. 
  • In The Catholic Store, Inc. v. City of Jacksonville, the Middle District of Florida entered a consent decree which concluded that The Catholic Store, a privately owned Catholic book store in Jacksonville, is exempt from Jacksonville’s public accommodations law. The order exempts the bookstore from the non-discrimination provisions relating to sexual orientation and gender identity.
  •  France’s Council of State upheld the government’s ban on Muslim girls wearing the abaya at school. The court found that the ban did not constitute a serious interference with private life, freedom of worship, or the right to education.
Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Webinar Next Week: Cultural Property in Law and Diplomacy

Next week, along with the Fletcher Initiative on Religion, Law, and Diplomacy at Tufts, the Centre for Religion and Culture at Oxford, and the Armenian Studies Program at Fresno State, the Center will co-sponsor a webinar on cultural property in law and diplomacy. The event will bring together a cross-disciplinary group of scholar-practitioners to discuss the challenges of and opportunities for preserving the rights of access to places of worship for religious groups in cases of contested spaces and in diverse conditions of active and non-active conflict. Speakers will include Narine Ghazaryan (Nottingham), Evanghelos Kyriakides (Kent), Peter Petkoff (Oxford), and Michalyn Steele (BYU). Center Co-Director Mark Movsesian will moderate, along with Sergio La Porta (Cal State-Fresno) and Elizabeth Prodromou (Tufts).

The webinar will take place on Thursday, October 14 at 12 pm EST. Posts from the participants will appear subsequently here on the Forum. Hope you can join us! For further information and a link to join the event, please see below:

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Armenia’s Future

In First Things today, I have an essay on the Second Karabakh War: what happened, why it happened, and Armenia’s path for the future. Here’s an excerpt:

Notwithstanding the loss of territory and the terrible loss of life, Armenians should resist despair. Armenia’s history is very long, and things have looked bleak at many points—for example, when the Persians defeated Armenians at the Battle of Avarayr in the fifth century, when Arabs invaded in the seventh, when Turks invaded in the eleventh, and when Mongols invaded in the fourteenth. More recently, there was the 20th-century genocide after which, improbably, Armenians succeeded in reestablishing a state for the first time in several hundred years. 

In the wake of the Second Karabakh War, Armenians need to evaluate their mistakes—especially their misguided optimism about support from Western governments and human rights organizations—accept certain realities, and work to rebuild. Notwithstanding a calamitous history filled with injustice, Armenians have preserved a distinct and continuous Christian witness in the Caucasus for millennia. With God’s help, they will survive this most recent defeat as well. 

You can read the whole essay here.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Event Next Week on International Religious Freedom

Our friend at Cardozo Law, Faraz Sanei, passes along an announcement for an event in new York next week on international religious freedom, “Mapping the Landscape of International Religious Freedom Policy,” sponsored by the Religious Freedom Institute. Speakers include Sanei and Tom Farr, who spoke at our own conference on international religious freedom in Rome in 2014 (time flies). Looks very worthwhile. Details at the link.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Loeffler, “Rooted Cosmopolitans”

aca1146015d05fa2dd74a8f8d12d3f33Lately, scholars have begun to pay serious attention to the Christian roots of current international human rights law–Samuel Moyn’s interesting work comes to mind. One shouldn’t be surprised to learn about Christian roots; Christians like Maritain and Malik were instrumental in the post-war human rights revolution, to cite just a couple of names. A new book from Yale University Press, Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, by University of Virginia historian James Loeffler, makes the point that contemporary human rights law has Jewish roots as well. Here’s the description from the Yale website:

A stunningly original look at the forgotten Jewish political roots of contemporary international human rights, told through the moving stories of five key activists

The year 2018 marks the seventieth anniversary of two momentous events in twentieth-century history: the birth of the State of Israel and the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Both remain tied together in the ongoing debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, global antisemitism, and American foreign policy. Yet the surprising connections between Zionism and the origins of international human rights are completely unknown today. In this riveting account, James Loeffler explores this controversial history through the stories of five remarkable Jewish founders of international human rights, following them from the prewar shtetls of eastern Europe to the postwar United Nations, a journey that includes the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, the founding of Amnesty International, and the UN resolution of 1975 labeling Zionism as racism. The result is a book that challenges long-held assumptions about the history of human rights and offers a startlingly new perspective on the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Annicchino, “Law and International Religious Freedom”

9781138282445I’m delighted to post this forthcoming book by Forum guest blogger and Tradition Project member Pasquale Annicchino, Law and International Religious Freedom: The Rise and Decline of the American Model (Routledge). Pasquale, a fellow at the European University Institute, is a rising star in comparative law and religion studies, with a special focus on international religious freedom. The issues he highlights in this book — the debate between individualistic and communitarian understandings of religion and the need for law to focus on major rights violations — are important ones, in America and abroad. Here’s a description of his book from the Routledge website:

This book analyzes the promotion and protection of freedom of religion in the international arena with a particular focus on the role and influence of the US International Religious Freedom Act, 1998. It also investigates the impact of the IRFA on the legislation and policies of third countries and the EU. The book develops the story of the protection of religious freedom through foreign policy by showing how religious laws affect and shape a more communitarian dimension of the notion of freedom of religion which stands in contrast with a traditionally Western individualistic understanding of the right. It is argued that it is still possible to defend the unstable category of freedom of religion or belief especially when major violations are at stake. The book presents a balanced contribution to the academic debate on the promotion and protection of religious freedom. The comparative approach and interdisciplinary methodology make it a valuable resource for academics, students and policy- makers in Law, International Relations and Strategic Studies.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Graybill, “Religion, Tradition, and Restorative Justice in Sierra Leone”

In June, the University of Notre Dame Press will release “Religion, Tradition, and Restorative Justice in Sierra Leone,” by Lyn Graybill.  The publisher’s description follows:

In this groundbreaking study of post-conflict Sierra Leone, Lyn Graybill examines the ways in which both religion and local tradition supported restorative justice initiatives such as the national Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and village-level Fambul Tok ceremonies.

Through her interviews with Christian and Muslim leaders of the Inter-Religious Council, Graybill uncovers a rich trove of perspectives about the meaning of reconciliation, the role of acknowledgment, and the significance of forgiveness. Through an abundance of polling data and her review of traditional practices among the various ethnic groups, Graybill also shows that these perspectives of religious leaders did not at all conflict with the opinions of the local population, whose preferences for restorative justice over retributive justice were compatible with traditional values that prioritized reconciliation over punishment.

These local sentiments, however, were at odds with the international community’s preference for retributive justice, as embodied in the Special Court for Sierra Leone, which ran concurrently with the TRC. Graybill warns that with the dominance of the International Criminal Court in Africa—there are currently eighteen pending cases in eight countries—local preferences may continue to be sidelined in favor of prosecutions. She argues that the international community is risking the loss of its most valuable assets in post-conflict peacebuilding by pushing aside religious and traditional values of reconciliation in favor of Western legal norms.