Extract from Oral
answer (Lords) on Forced Marriage
(Con): My
Lords, I thank my noble friend for his Answer but, according to
the Aurat Foundation, 1,000 Hindu and Christian women and girls
are abducted, forcibly converted and married off in Pakistan
every year. In India, there are similar allegations of Muslim
girls being forcibly converted to Hinduism and married off. Of
course, this has also been a feature of Boko Haram’s tactics.
Despite the last four communiqués making reference to early,
child and forced marriage, none has addressed investigating the
interrelationship with forced religious conversion. As chair of
the Commonwealth for the next two years, will Her Majesty’s
Government commission the necessary research to understand this
complex relationship and investigate potential solutions?
The Minister of State, Department for International
Development (Lord Bates) (Con): I am grateful for my
noble friend’s question and I pay tribute to her work with the
Commonwealth Initiative for Freedom of Religion and Belief, which
has had a significant impact. I draw attention to the very
substantial measures on freedom of religion and belief—led by my
noble friend Lord Ahmad—that we have already announced, such as a
£12 million fund through Aid Connect to look specifically at
this. On the specific instance of Pakistan that the noble
Baroness mentioned, one of the things that we were clear about in
Pakistan’s UN review last year was the importance of protecting
minority rights and the possible need for an independent
commission on such rights. We are doing significant things but we
have to be clear that this is not only about the communiqué. The
Commonwealth charter talks about the importance of,
“tolerance, respect, understanding, moderation and religious
freedom which are essential to the development of free and
democratic societies”.
That is why we will continue to hold other states to account and
seek to live up to that...
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Extract from Commons
debate on the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community
(Heywood and Middleton)
(Lab):...I want to mention here the discrimination faced
by Ahmadi women, who live in a patriarchal society. As well as
facing similar harassment to Ahmadi men, they can become socially
isolated and face overt discrimination during routine activities,
such as shopping or going to the market. Some shops display signs
and banners that say they do not deal with “Qadianis”, the
pejorative term used to refer to Ahmadi Muslims. The term
originates from Qadian, a small town in northern India, which was the birthplace of Mirza
Ghulam Ahmad, the founder of the Ahmadiyya movement...
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