An International Response to a Global Crisis: A Conversation with Baroness Warsi on Religious Freedom

Friday, November 15, 2013
2:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. EST
Location: Robert and Bernice Wagner Alumni House Map

The United Kingdom’s first ever minister for faith, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, made the case for an international response to religious persecution. Drawing on the British government’s strategy to promote religious freedom at home and abroad, Foreign and Commonwealth Office Minister Warsi offered ways forward in tackling the persecution of Christians and other minorities—something she has dubbed a "global crisis." The Religious Freedom Project's Tom Farr was the moderator.

This event is co-sponsored by the Berkley Center, the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project, and the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.

Discover similar content through these related topics and regions.

Related Religious Freedom

Related Religion and World Politics

Related Europe

Image Gallery

1/1

An International Response to a Global Crisis: A Conversation with Baroness Warsi on Religious Freedom

Featured Participant

Sayeeda Warsi Toggle

About Sayeeda Warsi

Baroness Sayeeda Warsi is a lawyer and politician who became the first Muslim to serve in a British cabinet upon her 2010 appointment by Prime Minister David Cameron as minister without portfolio. She was the United Kingdom's senior minister of state at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and minister for faith and communities from 2012 until she resigned in August 2014, citing the government's “morally indefensible” policy on Gaza. A Conservative Party member, she became vice chairman and advisor to leader Michael Howard in 2004 and was appointed party co-chairman in 2010—the first Asian to chair a major British political party. She was elevated to the House of Lords in 2007, becoming the youngest peer in Parliament. She participated in a 2009 landmark debate with British National Party leader Nick Griffin on Question Time. Warsi studied law at Leeds University and worked for the Crown Prosecution Service before setting up her own legal practice; she also served six years at the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.

Sayeeda Warsi's Profile

Other Participant

Thomas Farr Toggle

About Thomas Farr

Thomas F. Farr is president emeritus of the Religious Freedom Institute, an NGO committed to achieving worldwide acceptance of religious liberty. Farr is also a senior fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. From 2006 to 2018 he was an associate professor of the practice of religion and world affairs at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior fellow at the Berkley Center; during 2017 and 2018 he was director of the Religious Freedom Research Project and from 2011 to 2016 director of the Religious Freedom Project, both at the Berkley Center. After a distinguished career in the U.S. Army and the Foreign Service—which included teaching at West Point and the Air Force Academy, serving as an advisor during U.S.-Soviet arms control talks in Geneva, and leading an interagency task force on verification provisions for the START II Treaty—Farr served as the first director of the U.S. State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom from 1999 to 2003.

Thomas Farr's Profile