Private Beliefs, Public Platforms and the Rule of Law

Sohail Wahedi is an Assistant Professor of Law at the Erasmus School of Law in the Netherlands and the 2022 Niels Stensen Fellow at the University of Toronto

This post is also a part of an ongoing discussion about Religion and the Rule of Law.

Introduction

In January 2021 Twitter decided to delete the account of one of its fervent users, Donald Trump, who insisted on spreading disinformation about election frauds during the 2020 Presidential elections.  A significant number of people will remember Trump as one of the most surprising political leaders in the history of the U.S. Not only because he was a champion of “fake news,” battled for fewer immigrants,  framed his legal and political opponents as “losers,” “stupid,” or “double-faced,”  but also because he—as “the King Social Media”—got deleted from Twitter.

Although some have supported Trump’s Twitter ban because of his use of social media in a way to target political opponents and to mobilize his supporters, others,  such as German chancellor Angela Merkel, have been very critical of the ban, calling the suspension “problematic” because of the importance of free speech in a real democracy. This free speech dimension and the considerable precedential force of the Trump Twitter ban has urged constitutional law scholars to scrutinize the power public platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter possess to intervene in matters of civil liberties.

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Video: Knox Thames on the U.S. Efforts to Advance Religious Freedom Globally

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sxlM5Xki3g In his interview, Knox Thames discusses U.S. religious freedom diplomacy, ambiguous interrelations between democracy and religious freedom protection, vulnerability of LGBT-community, converts, and atheists, and perspectives of international religious freedom. Read the full printed version…

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Christianity, Human Rights, and Dignity: Squaring the Triangle

Brett G. Scharffs
Brett G. Scharffs

Brett G. Scharffs is Rex E. Lee Chair, Professor of Law, and Director of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University

Andrea Pin is Associate Professor of Comparative Public Law, University of Padua, and Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law & Religion Emory University

Andrea Pin

Dmytro Vovk is Director of the Centre for the Rule of Law and Religion Studies, Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University (Ukraine) and co-editor of Talk About: Law and Religion

This blogpost is modified from Scharffs, Pin, and Vovk’s Introduction to “Human Dignity and Human Rights—Christian Perspectives and Practices: A Focus on Constitutional and International Law,” in a special issue of the BYU Law Review.

Dmytro Vovk

Introduction

The relationship between Christianity and human rights is a matter of deep controversy, drawing the attention of theologians, historians, lawyers, and philosophers alike. The historical connections between various denominations of Christianity and human rights and the dialectics between Christianity and human rights are matters of endless academic debates. How much contemporary narratives of rights are owed to Christianity, what Christianity has borrowed from nonreligious modern and post-modern thinkers, the extent to which the contemporary language of rights clash with Christian values, and the theoretical foundations of such clashes keep scholars busy.

The topic, however, is all but confined to theoreticians. How Christianity understands or ought to understand rights is often discussed within legal and political circles. The public role of Christianity and Christians in contemporary societies surfaces whenever a policy that touches upon Christian values is discussed. Parliaments and courts, especially in countries born out of Christianity, are often busy trying to reconcile religious freedom claims put forward by Christians with rights that contradict Christian morality.

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