The Alliance for a Secular Europe brings together organisations that favour secularism and are committed to democracy, human rights and non-discrimination. Secularism in this sense is understood as separation of religion and politics or state neutrality in matters of religion and belief.
While we have a wide range of specialist interests, we are all concerned at the way some reactionary religious forces are seeking to undermine secularism in Europe, by means such as:
- imposing by law on everyone patterns of behaviour that have their
origin and only justification in religious doctrine, - promoting unregulated exercise of conscientious objection and
unwarranted exemptions from equality and non-discrimination laws, - defending and seeking to extend financial subsidies from the taxpayer,
- exploiting special rights of access to government as with the EU’s
“Article 17” dialogue.
The Alliance’s main concerns are with the European institutions – principally the EU, OSCE and Council of Europe – although national situations with clear international implications may also be relevant.
We cooperate by the electronic exchange of information and alerts and by being ready in principle to take action (mainly by writing letters or otherwise lobbying our democratic representatives and others) both as organisations and through our own members or supporters.
Organisations interested in joining the Alliance should write with details of their purpose and activities, website URL, etc to admin@secular-europe.eu.