Campaigns & Activism
“The only thing standing between us and tyranny is our resistance”
Resisting Religious Fundamentalism
Project Resist co-directors have a long history of challenging all forms of religious coercion and fundamentalism in the UK. Using legal advocacy and campaigning tools that range from undertaking protests to initiating legal interventions and participating in inquiries and reviews, we have challenged ultra conservative and religious fundamentalist forces that use religion to pursue their own regressive political goals and to control women. These forces have become emboldened by growing state accommodation of minority religious identities to push for demands for religious freedom but instead shore up profoundly patriarchal, discriminatory and anti-democratic structures that stifle feminist and progressive voices of dissent. It is no accident that religious fundamentalist forces have particularly targeted education and family law as key battlegrounds thus bringing them into direct conflict with feminist demands for bodily and intellectual autonomy.
Our co-directors are members of Feminist Dissent, an online journal dedicated to challenging religious fundamentalist movements worldwide and their impact on the rights of women. Formed in 2016 to continue the work of Women Against Fundamentalism, it aims are to analyse how religious fundamentalism as a political movement plays out in different and often interrelated socio-economic and political contexts of racism, authoritarianism, neoliberalism and patriarchy. It provides an important space for developing an understanding of the nature of the multi-directional assault on women’s rights and to think through how we develop multi-directional forms of resistance and build alliances and solidarity based on the values of feminism, equality, anti-racism, secularism and universal human rights.
Parallel Legal Systems
One of the most concerning aspects of the rise of religious fundamentalism is the ways in which right wing religious forces have targeted women’s rights in the family sphere. The government’s austerity measures, cuts to legal aid, lack of investment in the family courts and a push to develop alternative out of court forms of family mediation and arbitration to ease the pressure on the family courts, have emboldened the religious right in minority communities to step into the vacuum that has been created. In many black and minoritised communities, they have set up parallel legal systems to arbitrate on family matters as yet another means by which to control women and girls.
The set up of the world’s first Sikh ‘Court’ in London on 1 June 2024 is one such example. Its emergence although shocking is not surprising. For many years, some of us have campaigned against the growth of Sharia councils and the creation of the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal because they targets the rights and freedoms of women and children in particular. Time and again, women who have used them complain about how they are blamed and shamed for seeking a divorce or separation and often they are forced to return to abusive relationships or only granted a divorce if they waive their rights to children and property.
As with other religious systems, the Sikh court has cited delays in the legal system, the introduction of no-fault divorce and the so-called failure of the formal legal system to understand religious values as the key reasons for its creation. The court’s spokespersons have stated that the court will address ‘low-level domestic violence’ cases as well as issues of ‘anger management, gambling and substance misuse’ through mediation and arbitration processes, which in some cases can be legally binding.
There are many disturbing aspects to these claims and to the court’s operation including the lack of adherence to rule of law principles, the in-built discrimination against women who dissent from religious norms and the contravention of protocols and practice in the formal legal system that has established the principle of no mediation in domestic abuse cases. For more information about the harmful consequences of parallel legal system on women see here.
In partnership with professionals and organisations such as One Law for All, Project Resist will be embarking on sustained policy and campaigning work on this issue as part of our work on improving the family justice system.