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About Us Secretary General Letter from the Secretary General - May 1999 Dear IRLA Board Members and Experts: As the Meeting of Experts in Madrid has ended, I want to share with you some follow up. The meeting was excellent and we had very good lectures. Professors de la Hera and Martinez de Codes, along with the team from the Ministry of Justice of Spain were very kind and helpful. It was a pleasure to work with them. While working on the Declaration, our ambition to do something significant for future use grew. Under the advice of Dr. Doudou Diene from UNESCO, Professor de la Hera and our president, Bishop Gunnar Stålsett, we decided to continue working on the draft and have another meeting next January. The Department of Religious Affairs of the Ministry of Justice, is willing to help us again. We decided: To ask the IRLA staff to work on the text of and improve the initial draft of the Declaration by taking into account the remarks made at the meeting. The Secretary General will send the draft to the experts to get remarks and changes. This writing and rewriting of the Declaration will last until the end of November. A final draft will be written in December and sent to the Experts. The Experts will meet at the end of January in Spain, if the Ministry of Justice is able to welcome us. The Declaration on Proselytism and Religious Freedom will be studied carefully, then supported by a consensus, or rejected if there is no consensus. If a consensus is found, the Declaration will be published by IRLA and sent to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, UN Special Rapporteur A. Amor, UNESCO, World Council of Churches, the Vatican, etc. A list of destinations will be better defined during the meeting in January 2000. As you can see, we are more ambitious now than we were at the beginning. We were a group of 30 people for the previous meeting in Madrid; we will be less in January. As the meeting will not include lectures, but only discussion on a text, a smaller number of attendees (between 15-20 people) will be more efficient and we would also be able to save financially. We will also be spending two nights in Spain, instead of three. This is information concerning our upcoming Meeting of Experts. I must add that Maurice Verfaillie, Secretary General of the association pour la defense de la liberté religieuse, ADLR, and editor of the well-known Conscience et Liberté will publish some of the papers from the Madrid meeting. Fides et Libertas will publish some of the papers in English, then Conscience et Liberté will publish the same papers in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. . . not bad at all! John Graz Secretary General |
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