The Nettie Column

One of the activities in the IHEU office I have not mentioned before is that of providing university students of international relations with an opportunity to do practical work with an organisation which is concerned with human rights. So far we have had four of them each for several months and though our office is rather crowded as it is, we found it very pleasant to have them there – also because they were often quite helpful. Carmen Stuitje, especially, was most valuable for IHEU for she went on to do a great deal of work for our Human Rights and Development Programme.

Our students’ traineeship resulted in reports on the following subjects:

Carmen Stuitje: Women, Human Rights and the Development Programme of the IHEU.

Kirsten Bokkers: Evaluation of the Indian projects of Samskar and the Institute for the Advancement of Women.

Lonneke van Daal: The position of Humanism under Pancasila, a research into the possibility of humanism in Indonesia.

Ine Frijters: The status of women in Islam, a comparison between national law and human rights documents in Bangladesh, Indonesia and Egypt.

Copies of these reports – in English – are available from IHEU for NLG 15 each.

Another example of our involvement in educational maters is that we arranged for Peter Tibor Nagy, a very active member of the Hungarian humanist group to attend a human rights course for East Europeans in Strasbourg, which was organised by the Council of Europe. And this included a follow-up visit to the Utrecht office where he met with Rob Tielman (IHEU co-President) and our staff. Everything was paid for by the Council of Europe, on the basis that he was a representative of the IHEU.

I saw Peter for a few hours in Amsterdam (where I live) before he left to return to Budapest. The Hungarian humanists seem to have one of the most effective groups in the former Eastern bloc, influencing constitutional issues of church-state separation, ethical education, etc.

Talking of ethical education; last month over twenty students of the Dutch training programme for teachers of humanist ethical education at the University of Utrecht spent a week in Berlin to attend a seminar and to get acquainted with the work of their German colleagues. They also met with two Belgian teachers of ethical education and two Polish lecturers from the University of Warsaw. I gather that the trip was a huge success, everybody was very enthusiastic about their experiences.

Rob Tielman, who coordinates the Dutch academic training programme he started two years ago, has established close cooperation with the Berlin professionals in the field of ethical education. The latter, for instance, are making us of the Dutch curriculum which they had translated into German. In Berlin there are over 200 teachers of which 60 are working full time, in primary and secondary schools.

For some twenty years, Dutch humanist ethical education was only available in primary schools where at president about 400 teachers, mostly part-time are reaching 40,000 children (aged 8-12). Now Rob Tielman has already managed to secure twenty part-time jobs for his students in secondary schools (for 14-year-olds) and vocational training schools (for 17-23 year-olds). And I am quite sure that he will convince many more headmasters of the necessity to engage humanist teachers to educate their pupils in self-determination and social responsibility!

My next bit of news is also about cooperation: I am very happy to inform you that our British friends, ie the British Humanist Association, the National Secular Society, the Rationalist Press Association and the South Place Ethical Society are going to have shared headquarters in central London (see the address in the directory on the last pages of this issue). Thus they will be able to cooperate more closely and efficiently for the humanist cause.

In my first years with the IHEU I just could not understand why these relatively small groups did not get together and form one powerful organisation. Could they not see the advantages? Did they not want to influence British as much as possible. Being an outsider I clearly had little appreciation of the importance of the historical background and traditions of the various groups, for the strength of what we call in Dutch ‘the smell of the nest.’

By now I have had lots of experience with these kinds of feelings within the IHEU. Not only in large countries like the USA and India where there are naturally more cultural differences, but in small countries as well – the Netherlands not excepted – most groups tend to be wary of joining with others. Even if they are well aware of the possible benefits (more clarity of purpose, efficiency, financial savings) such rational considerations do not always overcome emotional ones. Therefore I am all the more delighted that all the British humanist groups have diced to live together. Maybe this co-habitation will result in a happy union after all.

I may add that in the Netherlands as well, all humanist organisations are now making plans for more cooperation.

Elsewhere in this issue you will find a detailed report of the international congress on ‘Embarrassment of Identities: Humanism and the future of Europe’ which was held on the occasion of the first lustrum of the University of Humanist Studies. Let me just say that I hugely enjoyed it; there were very interesting speakers, fine music, many friends and exciting workshops; I attended one on the controversial subject of drugs.

To end with I would like to quote one of the speakers, senator David Norris from Ireland, lecturer at Trinity College, who is an outstanding campaigner for human rights. As Ireland’s first openly gay politician he is used to standing up against religious prejudice and oppression. Because I always suffer from doubts about the limits of tolerance towards religions, I felt very reassured when he said:

‘It is my opinion that we in Europe have become far too squeamish about disturbing sensibilities of religious groups. I have no qualms whatsoever myself about denouncing the offensive brutalities of the application of the Moslem Sharia law, the Fatwah on Salman Rushdie, the racism of the ultra Orthodox followers of Meir Kahane or the political implications of Protestant or Roman Catholic fundamentalism. Indeed I regard the intervention of the Vatican in collaboration with the Bush administration at the Rio Earth Summit which had the effect of marginalising the question of world population, perhaps the single most urgent problem facing us as we near the millennium, as nothing short of disastrous. In other words where religious institutions behave politically, the response must also be political and not deferential.’