Human Rights

With the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, a new movement in jurisprudence emerged concerned with the defence of human rights. The post-War reaction to Nazi atrocities stimulated the creation of both the United Nations (1945) and the European Convention on Human Rights (1950). Since then the expression human rights has entered into common usage.

It is interesting to note at the outset that several of the key architects for the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention were firm believers in a personal creator God: Rene Cassin (Jewish believer), Charles Habib Malik (Lebanese Christian), and Arthur Henry Robertson (British Christian). Cassin, who won the Nobel Prize in 1969 and established the International Institute for Human Rights, maintained that the basis for the Universal Declaration derived from the Ten Commandments.

For Wiccans and Christians alike, the subject of human rights is important both retrospectively and in our contemporary circumstances. By retrospective, I mean honestly dealing with the violation of human rights in the persecution of witches hundreds of years ago. In our contemporary situation human rights questions about religious freedom, animal rights and environmental rights need to be tackled.

John Warwick Montgomery is a human rights specialist who served as Director of Studies at the International Institute of Human Rights, Strasbourg from 1979-81. Montgomery has written extensively in the field tackling such subjects as the Marxist approach to human rights, the philosophical justification for human rights, and right-to-life issues. Montgomery was in Beijing at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and has written about the problem of human rights in China. Montgomery has also written about witch trial theory and legal practice. His scholarship on these many issues forms the basis of the following discussion.

In retrospect one can always benefit from hindsight and hopefully learn from the lessons of history. The witch trials are one of the many blights in the history of European jurisprudence. Judicial torture was a feature of ancient Roman law, but fell out of favour with the rise and spread of Christianity. Christians had been subjected to persecution and torture at the hands of the Roman Imperial legal system. In the fifth century, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote against the use of torture in obtaining confessions. Pope Gregory the Great echoed his stance in the sixth century and Pope Nicholas I did the same in the ninth century. In 928 AD 'good King Wenceslas' of Bohemia destroyed instruments of torture. In the twelfth century Decretum of Gratian likewise repudiated torture.

The reintroduction of judicial torture into continental law occurred in the later Middle Ages and coincided with the efforts of monarchs to create centralized states over against the local autonomy of feudalism. At the same time the Roman Church was centralizing its administrative controls. Lamentably, ancient Roman Imperial law became the model for both civil and canon law. The sad irony is that the very faith that had once been the victim of persecution, now approved of the very methods once used against it to now tackle non-orthodox belief. These developments also coincided with the weakening and waning of the old social order in medieval Europe, and Witchcraft was not just a rival belief system but also represented a genuine movement of social protest and reform.

In England, and later on in the American colonies, the legal tradition developed along different lines to those on the continent. The common law tradition developed out of Biblical principles of law, such as the Ten Commandments, and Jesus' Golden Rule that you do to others as you would be done by them. The Magna Carta, which also reflected Biblical truths, originated from the work of Cardinal Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The common law tradition prohibited secret trials and the extraction of confessions by torture. Yet civil rights were curtailed at times whenever the monarch sought to reassert absolute power, as was the case with the Tudor and Stuart monarchs. The Star Chamber these monarchs created and perpetuated was struck down by Parliament in 1641 as contrary to the Magna Carta. Thus the use of torture and the denial of civil rights to witches in England was not a product of the Biblically influenced common law, but rather arose when monarchs subverted it for their own gains. This, of course, does not excuse the witch trials themselves.

However small comfort this may be, Wiccans nonetheless need to be aware that not all Christians approved of judicial torture. During the anti-Witch mania Protestants such as Johann Weyer and Reginald Scot sought to have reason rather than torture applied in the Witch Trials. On the Catholic side, Alonso de Salazar y Frias as an Inquisitor was scrupulous about the civil rights of the accused being properly observed. Augustin Nicolas, a French Catholic jurist, in 1682 wrote a treatise opposing torture, branding it devilish and condemning it from the Bible. Samuel Sewall (1652-1730) was Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court and he publicly recanted the part he played in the New England Witch Trials.

The primary issue that needs to be faced is whether witchcraft should have been considered a criminal offence in the first place. Montgomery notes that 'the proper function of human law is to regulate conduct so as to prevent injustice among men; it is not to regulate ideas or coerce opinions' ( The Law Above The Law,  p. 77). Witchcraft entailed ideas and beliefs, more than it had to do with acts. If a Christian or a Wiccan commits murder, the offender should be prosecuted under the provisions of the law with due consideration for the evidence.

However to prosecute a Wiccan simply by virtue of being a devotee of the Craft was and remains a colossal miscarriage of justice. Unless it can be demonstrated that the Craft itself involves criminal activity and is a threat to the body politic, then the prohibition, persecution and prosecution of Wiccans cannot be legally justified. As we have already seen, the Craft does not involve the ritual sacrifice of humans or animals and thus poses no criminal threat to the body politic. The Witch Trials were a violation of human rights and human dignity. Although the Christian prosecutors believed back then that they were opposing a genuine societal and theological evil, they assumed the role of God to act as judge on the matter. They achieved far more evil themselves than the good that Jesus taught his followers to do.

In contemporary human rights both Wiccans and Christians have something to say about the rights of animals and the environment, and also on religious freedom. This is not the place to undertake a detailed discussion of these matters. However I would like to highlight a few salient points.

In human rights law it has become commonplace to speak of there being three generations of rights: (a) civil and political, (b) economic, social and cultural, and (c) solidarity. The question of animal and environmental rights comes with the third category of solidarity rights, whilst religious freedom comes with the first category of civil and political rights. Although there is much admiration for the concept of human rights, our global community nonetheless embraces a smorgasbord of theories and groups concerning the definition and justification of human rights.

The expression human rights by definition refer to titles or entitlements given. The concept is relational because it presupposes a source for the entitlement given. In our human relationships we must ask who has the authority or power to confer a right or entitlement on us. If we considered this point at length, I believe it can be argued that in order to both define and justify rights, we must defer to the transcendent. The fundamental reason here being that the One who created us is the only One who can tell us what our intrinsic worth happens to be. Also being transcendent, the Creator is not limited by our fallible perspectives and prejudices.

From a Christian standpoint, God's perspective on human rights can be grounded in Biblical revelation. Both the theology of the creation and the incarnation of Christ provide the grounds for justifying rights. The rights are entitlements given to us by God. If we approach the question of animal and environmental rights, we find that both Wiccans and Christians have something to say. Wiccans affirm that the earth is sacred and they seek to do no harm to others. A Christian understanding of the creation should, as we have noted before, be based on the awareness that the earth belongs to the Lord and we have been appointed as stewards to care for it. With regards to animals, Christians need to reflect on their standing in the original creation, their inclusion in both the Noahic covenant and in the new heaven and new earth. Indeed, it is high time Christians reflected more carefully on the fact that Jesus was born and placed in an animal's feeding trough in a stable, and that animals were also witnesses to his birth.

Andrew Linzey has discussed animal rights at length from a Christian standpoint. There will be points of overlap and difference on these matters between Wiccans and Christians primarily on the basis of who has revealed the essential values - the Goddess or the biblical God.

As regards religious freedom both Wiccans and Christians have a keen desire to support this. The historical experience of the Witch Trials looms large in the collective memory of Wiccans as a powerful incentive to oppose religious repression. For the Christian the upholding of religious freedom is not alien to the proclamation of Jesus as the Saviour of the world.

First, both Christians and Wiccans need to recall the positive role of Christians in championing a variety of causes. Here is a small list to contemplate: support and shelter for widows, orphans and the destitute, opposing infanticide in the Roman Empire, the framing of the Magna Carta, the building of hospitals and the emergence of the nursing profession, the abolition of child labour by William Wilberforce, the abolition of slavery, the establishment of the Red Cross by Henry Dunant, outlawing widow burnings in India, the Afro-American civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, and Amnesty International started by Catholic lawyer Peter Benenson to name but a few.

Second, Montgomery addresses the misconception that the Christian Gospel is opposed to religious freedom. He states, 'the scriptural gospel cannot be forced on anyone: if it is not freely accepted, it is not accepted at all … Jesus never forces Himself on man, and the true Christian believer can hardly justify doing what his Master will not do. Thus, even viewed from the standpoint of the absolute truth of the gospel, repressing non-Christian beliefs is indefensible: in removing freedom of religious choice, one removes in principle the opportunity genuinely to choose Christ Himself' ( Human Rights & Human Dignity,  pp. 171-172).

In an open and free society Christians should be willing to defend the rights of others to adhere to the beliefs they have, whilst at the same time encouraging dialogue and sharing about the unique claims and teachings of Jesus to those who want to listen.