The grisly tale of a Sudanese woman raises broader questions about how to promote religious freedom
By B.C.
ON THE face of things, a particularly nasty story of a Sudanese woman who was nearly hanged for being a Christian came to end today after some artful Italian diplomacy.
Meriam Ibrahim was sentenced to a delayed death sentence because she had supposedly abandoned Islam, the religion of her father. She insisted that she adhered to the Christian faith of her mother, who had raised her. Under massive international pressure, her conviction was reversed and she was freed in June—but her initial attempt to leave the country was unsuccessful and she was handed over to the custody of the American embassy in Khartoum.
Today she finally tasted freedom, as the world learned from the Facebook page of Lapo Pistelli, an Italian deputy foreign minister who posted a photograph of himself with Ms Ibrahim as they were both about to land at Rome airport. "Today is a day of celebration," declared Italy's prime minister Matteo Renzi as he welcomed Ms Ibrahim and her family. Later, she met Pope Francis who "thanked her for her witness to faith", according to a Vatican spokesman.
Italy's involvement in negotiations with Khartoum had been kept secret. But over the past decade, successive Italian administrations have declared that religious freedom will be one of their priorities in world affairs. Last year, when the European Union adopted guidelines for promoting freedom of conscience in all dealings with outsiders, that was in large part thanks to an Italian initiative. Two recent foreign ministers, Franco Frattini and Giulio Terzi, have made a point of co-operating closely with the Vatican to promote religious liberty. Mr Frattini lobbied for Christians being persecuted in Pakistan; at one point he secured a promise from the President of Pakistan that Asia Bibi, a Christian woman convicted of blasphemy, would not be executed.
But despite some spectacular initiatives, neither Italy nor the European Union has a consistent or effective way of promoting religious freedom across the world. In Italy, the cause has become partisan, bound up with other issues which are close to the heart of Catholic conservatives, like protecting the principle that Christian crosses should be displayed in Italian classrooms.
When Emma Bonino, a secularist and veteran Eurocrat had a spell recently in charge of the foreign ministry, she downgraded the religious freedom portfolio and she allowed a newly formed "observatory" on religious liberty to die a quiet bureaucratic death. This was apparently because the cause had become associated with a traditionalist Catholic agenda. As is well argued by Pasquale Annicchino, a research fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, efforts to promote religious freedom in the world will be far more effective if they are non-partisan, securely funded and ideally pan-European.
In Europe as in America, the limits of religious freedom (as they apply to church schools, reproductive rights and so on) are intensely controversial in the domestic arena. But everybody can agree that sentencing a pregnant woman to death because she has supposedly abandoned her religion is an unspeakable horror. It would be a pity if disagreements over the first category of issues prevented effective action over the second.
