Guarantees of the international protection of freedom of religious practice

Abstract

The freedom of practicing religious rituals is one of the most important liberties that an individual needs and it should be recognized for him for it has a contact with the spiritual aspects of self and it should be satisfied because it has an importance for each individual, besides this freedom is the confirmation of the entity of the individual and the personification of self's will towards the community in which one lives, for it is the right of each person to embrace a religion or a particular doctrine and follow its teachings without interference or compulsion, and to avoid the coercion from any authority or person or to avoid the detracting from this belief or that doctrine, and then it is the right of every person to practice that freedom in form of worships and certain rituals, and each person should have the full freedom in choosing the appropriate time and place to perform them alone or in groups, and religious freedom means the freedom of human and his ability to come up with certain activities that have a religious and ideological nature in condition that they do not lead to harm others or abuse their rights and freedoms, and Islamic tolerant law is one of the early laws that has recognized the freedom of religion by the Mighty Allah saying in the holy Quran ((no compulsion in religion)) Sura Al-Baqra: Verse 265. And For this, we find that providing international protection for the freedom of religious practices has become one of the issues that must have huge international concern, especially with the increasing manifestations of persecution and discrimination that are based on religious and sectarian basis, and therefore the importance of this issue is clearly reflected by highlighting the system of international protection for freedom of practicing religious rituals, to determine the extent of the seriousness and the efficiency of this protection through mechanisms that have been observed, and these mechanisms are to be the activated in the field especially in light of the obvious and persistent abuses that this freedom exposed to in more than one place in comparison with its major importance and value in human life. And this maintains the hypothesis of thesis on the basis of the inadequacy of the means that stated in the national laws for achieving the necessary protection for the freedom of religious rituals, and this hypothesis is no way to be denied, as it is crowded with legislations from many countries with scripts that stresses the need to promote and respect the freedom of religious rituals, but those scripts have no significant effect of that importance in reality, so there must be a complementary protection to the precedent one in order to protect this freedom and to prevent any infraction and to ensure that it is enjoyed by all people in all nations, and then putting an international protection of this freedom through the international human rights law, through the adoption of general principles that are based on human dignity and the essential concepts of equality and Justice, which is proved to all individuals, making no differentiation between them regardless of their race, sex, religion, language or nationality or any other reason.