Since the end of World War Two, the speed, breadth and long-term consequences of world events have put human rights high on the international political and legal agenda. The Holocaust, genocides in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sudan, and too many acts of mass terrorism are some of the events that have placed them there. Some nations — usually inveterate abusers — would just as soon that human rights were not prominent. Others — usually rights respecters — have taken a proactive approach to protecting individual fundamental freedoms by incorporating into their own legal systems all or many of the traditional rights found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international protective instruments. In fact, protecting human rights has gained sufficient momentum in the international arena that even most countries that do not support such rights at least pay lip service to them and include them — though often with qualifications — in their constitutional laws and charters.

Among the rights at the heart of the debate, rights fundamental to democracy and its institutions, are those of conscience, religion and belief. Touching at the core of what it means to be human, at the very essence of the significance men and women give to their lives and the lives of others, protection of rights of conscience can be found in virtually every human rights charter, bill, and comprehensive code. The importance of these rights permits analysis of their protection as models for the protection of fundamental rights in general.