Unlike other countries, Norway has only one Humanist organisation, The Norwegian Humanist Association (NHA). The NHA receives state support on equal terms with other Norwegian faith and life-stance communities, and – at the same time – works for a formal separation between state and church. This makes Norway exceptional.

The man who led and inspired the most successful national Humanist group in the world just celebrated his 70th birthday. The son of a Pentecostal preacher, Levi Fragell was a full-time preacher himself before he was 20, and was considered the rising star of Norway’s evangelical movement.

Nigerian Humanist leader Leo Igwe and his Humanist colleagues have been awarded the Rainbow Humanist Award by Nordic Rainbow Humanists for their risky public support of LGBT rights in Nigeria.

We do not have separation of government and religion in Norway today. We still have a state church with specific privileges in society, having a firm hold over the mindset of the people in Norway – usually under the guise of “our cultural heritage”.

Fritanke.no, the newspaper of the Norwegian Humanist Association has announced that selected articles from its Norwegian edition will also be available in English. The English language articles can be found at http://www.fritanke.no/ENGLISH/ The first two articles on the site relate to the important developments and arrangements made by a joint National Assembly relating to the State-Church relation in Norway.

In 1997 some Norwegian parents started a court case to try to gain the right to withdraw their children from KRL classes (Christian, Religious and Life Stance Education), which are very much slanted towards Christianity. This case subsequently went through every level of the Norwegian courts (with the parents being supported by the Norwegian Humanist Association), but without success.

There were celebrations in the Humanist House in Oslo last Friday, when the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg found that the religious education in Norwegian schools was in violation of Article 2 of Protocol No. 1 of the European Human Rights Convention.

Prof. Carl-Johan Kleberg, former Chairman of the Swedish Humanist Association, presented this report to the 1st Baltic Humanist Conference in Stockholm. Based on a study of 11 Nordic countries – Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Russia and Sweden, it makes a series of recommendations viz.

The 12-month long 50th anniversary celebrations of the Norwegian Humanist Association (NHA) which started last year concluded recently. During an anniversary year crowded by adverts and articles in the media, conferences, seminars and social events, a ‘Norwegian Humanist Manifesto 2006’ was adopted, and a 536-page history of the Association was published by Prof. Paul Knutsen.