Title: Freedom of Thought, Conscience and Religion: The Potential for Bridging the Gap between Western and Other Approaches
Abstract: In 2016, a jointly organized conference led by His Highness, King Muhammad VI of Morocco, the Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs of the Kingdom of Morocco and the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies, promulgated the Marrakech Declaration. This aimed to foster a religions-based approach to create a form of pluralism in Muslim lands. It posited that this should be based ‘on a “Common Word,” requiring that such cooperation must go beyond mutual tolerance and respect, to providing full protection for the rights and liberties to all religious groups in a civilized manner that eschews coercion, bias, and arrogance. This was followed in 2017 with a Declaration promulgated in Beirut by religious faith-based and civil society actors, setting out that their respective religions and beliefs shared a common commitment to upholding the dignity and the equal worth of all human beings. Further that faith and rights should be mutually reinforcing spheres and, that human rights can benefit from deeply rooted ethical and spiritual foundations grounded in religions or beliefs. The first of the eighteen commitments within the Beirut Declaration include illustrative, but not exhaustive, quotations from the texts of various religions.
In the presentation, dr Giles will explore the extent to which the religion-based approach proposed in these declarations holds the potential for bridging the gap between Western and other approaches to public living together under a rule of law incorporating a tranche of fundamental rights, in particular the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
Bio: Jessica Giles is a senior law lecturer at the Open University UK and Research Lead of the Project on Interdisciplinary Law and Religion Studies at the Open University: Project for Interdisciplinary Law and Religion Studies | The Open University Law School. She completed her PhD by published work on 'Freedom of Thought, Conscience, and Religion Supporting Peaceful Plural Living Together' at Leiden University, The Netherlands. She took her undergraduate law degree at Durham University and her Masters in International human rights law and European Union law at Bristol University. She studied theology at the Open Theological College and theology of law at Spurgeon’s College. She qualified as a Solicitor in 1991 and transferred to the bar in 2016.
Her area of research interest is the interdisciplinary synthesis of law & religion studies, constitutional theory and philosophical theology. She also explores aspects of technology, law and religion. This involves research into freedom of thought conscience and religion and related fundamental rights as well as the legal scope of religious freedom in public life. She is currently working on the theoretical underpinning of the right to freedom of thought conscience and religion in a comparative theological context and the practical impact of this for peaceful plural living together. She is also leading research into the implications of emerging technologies, as they intersect with theology and religion, for law creation.