A/HRC/37/49 belief groups should never be politicized for purposes of identity politics, as this may have detrimental effects on the situation of individuals from minority communities. 87. States are reminded of their obligation to provide protection to refugees and migrants, regardless of their specific religion or belief. The pretext that refugees and migrants would erode the traditional religious make-up of a country amounts to a “territorialization” of religion, which violates the spirit and the letter of the universal right to freedom of religion or belief. States should also reform family law and personal status law provisions that may amount to de jure or de facto discrimination against persons belonging to religious or belief minorities, for example in inheritance and custody matters. States should establish a policy of public symbolic actions by which they send a clear message that religious or belief minorities are part of the larger society. An example of such symbolic presence is the participation of political representatives in ceremonies held by minorities. 88. Respect for freedom of religion or belief is closely related to the degree of tolerance and respect for diversity within a society. The Special Rapporteur would like to reiterate the recommendations made by his predecessors on encouraging States to facilitate interfaith communication and to invest in both religious literacy and religious freedom literacy. 89. Finally, the Special Rapporteur would like to reiterate commitment IV of the “Faith for Rights” framework, which warns against the use of the notion of “State religion” to discriminate against any individual or group as well as against the use of “doctrinal secularism”, which risks reducing the space for religious or belief pluralism in practice.40 He stresses that States must satisfy a range of obligations, including to adopt measures that guarantee structural equality and to fully realize freedom of religion or belief. In the light of these obligations, the Special Rapporteur echoes the importance of adopting a model for the relationship between State and religion that is in harmony with the concept of “respectful distancing” — i.e. political and legal, but not social, disentanglement from religion — which rests on a “deep grounding of secularity based on human rights”. Such a model ensures “that the State does not resort to religious exclusivity or bias in culture, identity, schooling, or even symbolism for short-term ends and for vested interests, but will continually strive to create spaces of inclusiveness for all as an active and ongoing endeavour”.41 40 41 See www.ohchr.org/Documents/Press/Faith4Rights.pdf. See Bielefeldt, Ghanea and Wiener, Freedom of Religion or Belief (footnote 15), pp. 355–359. 19

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