Independent Inquiry into Conduct by Officials of the Inter Faith Network
Dear
Colleagues
We Call for an
Immediate Independent Inquiry into Alleged Misconduct by Officials of the Inter
Faith Network
We are writing to you as a Member Body of the Inter Faith Network for the
United Kingdom (IFN) in relation to matters of governance of the IFN which are
of great concern to us and our colleagues from other faith and interfaith
organisations.
The
Director, Chairs and Executive Committee of the Inter Faith Network have
presented us with a proposed "Code of Conduct" for IFN Member Bodies
for passing at an AGM, which we and a number of our sister IFN Members see as
potentially being used to restrict criticism of the IFN leadership - and in
relation to which legal advice we have received indicates may in fact be unlawful.
We are particularly concerned that while the IFN Executive has created this
Code of Conduct in relation to IFN Members who have made criticisms of the
behaviour and activities of some IFN officers, the IFN Executive has to
date been most unwilling to allow an independent investigation into alleged
misconduct by the IFN Director and certain IFN Trustees.
We are therefore writing to request there now immediately takes place a
wholly independent and impartial investigation into these allegations of
wrongdoing by the IFN Director and certain IFN Trustees. We propose that
the investigation be undertaken by:
1) An independent and neutral mediation body which is wholly
unconnected to the Inter Faith Network, and is acceptable to the
complainants as well as to the IFN. There are a number of well-respected
mediators, and we know of highly respected parliamentary peers and legal
professionals who would be very willing to chair such an independent investigation
into the IFN at minimal or no cost. So no excuse about costs is
applicable here.
2) The findings of the investigation are to be published in their entirety in
the public domain
3) If wrongdoing is found to have taken place by any IFN official or Trustee,
that appropriate sanctions are to be applied to those individuals, including
removal from post
For
some 25 years, the current IFN Director, Harriet Crabtree, has stated both
in writing and verbally that were the IFN to change its membership
policy to allow Minority Religions like Druids, Mormons or Pagans to join, that
there would be a risk that existing Faith Member Bodies of the IFN
would withdraw.
These
statements by the IFN Director have formed a significant basis for the
opposition over years (until very recently) by the Inter Faith Network to
changing its membership policy to admit hitherto excluded groups such as the
Druid Network, Ahmadiyyas, or Pagans. The statements by the IFN Director
have been taken with such seriousness that they have found their way into the legal
statements of the IFN and its solicitors such as in relation to the
controversial rejection by the IFN of the application by the Druid Network to
join in 2012 - "Note on the Legality of the Inter Faith Network's
Membership Arrangements" IFN, July 2012:
"The
primary ground on which an inter faith organisation, such as IFN, may within
this context, define its parameters of membership is according to the 'purpose
of the organisation'. If an organisation, the purpose of which is to
'foster or maintain good relations between persons of different religions or
beliefs', concludes that that work could be seriously affected by the
acceptance into membership of a particular organisation (or individual)...a
decision not to accept that membership application would be consistent with the
relevant provisions in Schedule 23 [Equality Act 2010]. An example of
this might be a decision by an inter faith organisation not to accept a
membership application from a particular faith organisation if the admission to
membership of that organisation could have the effect of leading to
representative bodies of major faith communities withdrawing from membership of
that inter faith organisation"
However,
the truth of the matter is that the Christian Churches in membership of
the IFN have clearly denied ever making such a suggestion of threatened
withdrawal, and no other faith community in membership of the IFN has ever
stated that they would potentially withdraw. With the new membership
policy now in place which does allow potential admissions of Druids or Pagans, no
IFN Faith Member Body is threatening to withdraw.
By
contrast, Harriet Crabtree has to date repeatedly refused requests to
her to provide written or other documentary evidence for the basis for her
several written and verbal claims to the effect that major faith communities
would withdraw from the IFN and that it is in her words "a
simple statement of fact" that the IFN's 25 year membership
policy was affected by the unwillingness of faith communities outside the nine
to be in engagement with others. And yet these untrue claims about
potential withdrawals, oft-repeated by the IFN Director and others, have for 25
years contributed to the religious discrimination and exclusion from membership
of Minority Religions in the taxpayer-funded IFN.
We
are deeply concerned by the IFN Director's unwillingness now to provide
documentary evidence for the claims that she has made over more than two
decades, which refusal by her raises strong question marks about issues of integrity,
truthfulness and good governance in the Inter Faith Network.
It
has been repeatedly alleged by a number of IFN Member Bodies and individuals
that the IFN Director made false representation in the papers for the IFN
Annual General Meeting of 12 July 2012. The papers for the AGM which were
prepared by Harriet Crabtree state clearly that merely "two
individuals", namely our colleagues, Phil Ryder and Muhammad
Al-Hussaini, respectively of the Druid Network and Scriptural Reasoning, had
raised concerns about the IFN's membership policy and issues of religious
discrimination by the IFN.
In
fact, it is evident that the IFN Director, Harriet Crabtree, had in
fact received well in advance of the date of the AGM a number of formal
resolutions and statements of strong concern by several Member Bodies of the
IFN and their officers, which they had sent for the 2012 AGM and which she
had clearly chosen to withhold from the AGM. These various missing
documents all in Harriet Crabtree's possession before that AGM, were
subsequently published by our colleagues, and may be downloaded from here:
http://www.theinterfaithnetwork.org.uk/missing_documents.pdf
Despite
the fact that these various written resolutions and statements of concern from
IFN Member Bodies were sent by IFN Member Bodies to the IFN Director, Harriet
Crabtree, prior to the AGM, to date she has provided no explanation why she
chose to withhold these documents and instead deliberately and untruthfully
represent in the AGM papers which she prepared that merely "two
individuals" had raised concerns about the IFN's policy. These facts
for us raise strong question marks about issues of integrity, truthfulness
and good governance in the Inter Faith Network.
It
has been alleged repeatedly in public by our colleagues that in response to
statements by ourselves and other IFN Member Bodies raising public concerns
about the discriminatory membership policy of the IFN, the IFN
Director, Harriet Crabtree, drafted statements which the then IFN Vice Chair,
now Co-Chair, Vivian Wineman, applied pressure upon certain Jewish clergy from
those IFN Member Bodies to sign.
Vivian
Wineman and Harriet Crabtree have claimed that these allegations are "defamatory",
despite the fact that the allegations have been made repeatedly in public, and
in fact made directly in writing to the IFN's solicitors,
Bates Wells Braithwaite, as far back as March 2013, with no successful
action forthcoming against any party making such allegations.
We
place this history of responding to questions and criticism made of the IFN
with behind-the-scenes bullying and pressure upon people's personal lives, in
the context of similar examples of such behaviour against critics by senior
interfaith leaders, namely of backroom bullying, political pressure and
interference against the careers of those clergy and academics of different
faiths who have exposed and criticised unethical conduct by those said senior
interfaith leaders:
These,
and various other examples appear to us to demonstrate that whereas modern
British society embraces a culture of free speech, open academic critique, and
democratic demands for transparency from leaders, by contrast, the closed world
of religious/inter-religious leadership continues to respond to those who ask
questions or shine a light upon instances of power abuse or corruption, by
evasiveness and concealment of facts, and by applying behind-the-scenes
pressure upon such whistle-blowers’ personal lives, careers and livelihoods.
Like
a typical Inter Faith Network AGM, high level national and international
interfaith activity appears to present a glowing external theatrical appearance
of pleasantries and mutual harmony in public meetings, while the abuse,
bullying and political silencing of critics by causing destruction to their
personal lives and careers continues behind the scenes. In this regard,
we see parallels in political interfaith abuse to the covering up of violence against
women, extremism and sexual abuse behind closed doors in different faith
communities.
The
unwillingness and evasiveness of the IFN to allow to date independent
investigation into these allegations of abuse of power and pressure by the IFN
Director and Co-Chair for us raise strong question marks about issues
of integrity, truthfulness and good governance in the Inter Faith Network.
We
note with sadness the recent resignation by the IFN Christian Co-Chair,
Revd Bob Fyffe from the Inter Faith Network, his doing so on a matter of
principle relating to an IFN meeting and the presentation of documents and
matters concerning IFN finance. We note similarly the spate of
resignations in recent months of some other IFN Trustees.
In
the light of this, we call for the IFN Director, Harriet Crabtree, and
the IFN Co-Chair, Vivian Wineman, to have the honesty and common courtesy to
apologise formally and on the record to Revd Fyffe, at the IFN Annual General
Meeting on 29 September 2014 in Birmingham, for the circumstances which caused Revd
Fyffe to feel obliged to resign as a matter of ethical principle.
We
are also most disturbed that the remarks about Revd Bob Fyffe's resignation
from the IFN made by one of our colleagues publicly at the IFN Extraordinary
General Meeting on 20 May 2014 in London, have been deliberately
omitted by the IFN Director and Executive Committee from the official
Minutes of that EGM meeting. This has been done despite two written
requests to the IFN Executive from our colleague that the Minutes truthfully represent
and do not falsify what he said at the EGM concerning Revd Fyffe's
resignation and other matters.
The
failure of the IFN Director and Co-Chair to date to make such a formal apology,
despite requests to them to do so, and likewise to truthfully record Minutes
where comments made are critical of them, for us raises strong
question marks about issues of integrity, truthfulness and good governance in
the Inter Faith Network.
One
of the most consistent and widespread criticisms of the IFN made by academics
of religious studies and human rights law at different universities and also by
Christian and other faith clergy, being criticism directed by them at the Inter
Faith Network project begun by Harriet Crabtree and Brian Pearce in 1987, is
that part of the political agenda of the IFN from its inception has always been
the manufacturing and promoting to power of unelected self-appointed IFN
"Faith Community Representative Bodies", which so-called faith
community leaders in certain cases do not in fact speak for the
faith communities they purport to represent.
The
depiction of the Crabtree-Pearce IFN project as a "colonialist
mechanism of control" , "the IFN is not interfaith
but intercommunal politics" and "take-me-to-your-leader",
is exemplified in such examples of IFN "Faith Community Representative
Bodies":
The
Inter Faith Network on 20 May 2014 passed a new Membership Admission Policy
under criterion ii) of which a bilateral inter faith body applying for national
category membership needs to show:
"Genuine
ownership by all the faith communities involved in its work, with
representation in its governance structure...of the faiths involved"
To
an innocent eye, this stated criterion about "genuine
ownership" would seem to indicate that if an interfaith
organisation were to be set up to promote dialogue between any two given
faiths, A and B, best efforts should be made to ensure that the charity has a
balanced representation between people of faith A and people of faith B on the
Board of Trustees or Executive Committee, with people of the two faiths A and B
concerned holding equal power and say in the control and financing of the
organisation, maybe rotating the Chair between those two faiths. This
would all appear to be a perfectly fair and just ethical principle of parity
and equality in interfaith bodies - contrasting sharply with the position of
some Church of England leaders (rejected by our own Anglican colleagues) of
wishing to be the "host" established church in leadership of interfaith,
with other faiths and denominations set up as "guests".
In
fact, running contradictory to this interpretation of the Membership Admission
Policy wording, Harriet Crabtree and the Inter Faith Network Membership
Sub-committee have applied the Membership Admission Policy in such an
astonishing and to our mind, perverse way that certain applicant interfaith
organisations are now being required to show that the people holding Trustee or
leadership positions in those interfaith organisations "represent"
their respective faith communities according to the definition of the IFN -
such as for example, acting on behalf of IFN "Faith Community
Representative Bodies". Therefore, what appeared initially to be a "genuine
ownership" clause to do with ensuring parity, equality and
fairness of control been faiths within the internal governance of interfaith
organisations, has been twisted instead to make the discourse to the effect
that interfaith groups in the category of national interfaith organisation, be
led by self-appointed IFN faith community representatives.
There
is a particularly galling double standard in the Inter Faith Network Membership
Sub-committee's language about "genuine ownership", in
that for some 25 years, the Christian Co-Chair of the IFN has always
been a bishop of the Church of England (not any other denomination), with the
sole brief exception of Revd Bob Fyffe from the Scottish Episcopal Church.
If the IFN were applying for membership of itself, it would fail the "genuine
ownership” test.
The
Inter Faith Network has likewise supported and collaborated with the "Near
Neighbours" funding programme for interfaith engagement, which
hands over millions of pounds of taxpayers' money for interfaith funding solely
into the hands of one group, namely the Church of England - without
any "genuine ownership" by any other faith or
non-Anglican Christian denomination. Major IFN Members like the Christian
Muslim Forum are funded and strongly linked to Church of England-led
Near Neighbours.
In
relation to these demands applied by the IFN around "genuine
ownership", leading existing IFN Member Bodies such as the Lambeth
Palace-founded project, the Christian Muslim Forum, have also never
had a non-Christian Director of equal status and equal salary to the Christian
Director, while the IFN itself has never had a person of a
non-Christian religious faith in the position of IFN Director. There
have in fact been bitter disputes in the UK interfaith arena around the
question of some Church of England leaders acting as a controlling host and
notoriously intervening or interfering in inter-religious projects which were
led entirely by people of other faiths or denominations (eg. in 2010, Guy
Wilkinson, the Church of England interfaith advisor and IFN Executive Committee
member famously intervened against a parliamentary meeting between Jewish and
Muslim clergy, nothing to do with the Church of England). We and our own
Anglican and non-Anglican colleagues are called to ask where is the equal and "genuine
ownership" here?
We
are particularly concerned to see that the Harriet Crabtree and the IFN
Membership Sub-committee have now taken it upon themselves to question
the charitable objects of certain applicant interfaith organisations for IFN
membership, despite the fact that these charities are already registered with
the Charity Commission using the official model charitable objects of the
Charity Commission. For example, Harriet Crabtree and the IFN
Membership Sub-committee questioned the charitable objects of one applicant
interfaith organisation, despite the fact that these charitable objects were
word-for-word the exact model form of words approved by the Charity Commission
for interfaith organisations, and furthermore were, word-for-word,
the exact charitable objects of several existing bilateral and multi-lateral
interfaith dialogue bodies already in membership of the IFN.
We
have considered the common thread behind these very visible and arbitrary
inconsistencies in the handling by the IFN of membership applications in
relation to these questions of:
1)
the IFN questioning” genuine ownership"
2)
the IFN questioning official Charity Commission model wording in the objects of
applicant member bodies
and
we note a clear common thread of political manoeuvring by the IFN against its
critics, namely that Mr Satish Sharma, the Hindu correspondent with
the IFN in relation to one membership application that has been rejected by the
IFN has been a vocal critic of unethical conduct in the Inter
Faith Network, while Mr Martin Weightman, the correspondent in
relation to another membership application that has been delayed by the IFN
leads an organisation which exposed in Parliament the prior unfair IFN
membership policy and also exposed other issues of corruption and linkage to
extremist groups in the Inter Faith Network.
We
believe that these allegations - correct or otherwise - are most serious and
are vital to address in as transparent and impartial and independent way as
possible, as the allegations strongly represent a picture of an IFN whose
organisational culture in one of dishonesty and evasiveness, obstructiveness,
arrogant lack of transparency and backroom bullying against those who criticise
or ask questions.
It
is clear that there has been a breakdown of trust by some IFN Member Bodies in
the governance of the IFN leadership and loss of confidence in certain of the
IFN's officers. This breakdown of trust is now strongly compounded by the
IFN's project of a "Code of Conduct" for IFN Members without any
willingness by it to date to investigate allegations of misconduct by those who
hold positions of leadership in the charity.
It
is therefore our view and that of our sister IFN Member Bodies that there must most
urgently now take place a wholly unrestricted discussion and shedding of light
upon these allegations that is moderated by an entirely neutral and independent
mediation body. No excuse can be presented by the IFN or any party
relative to costs, since these will be nominal as we know respected legal and
parliamentary colleagues who would be more than happy to chair such an
investigation.
Moreover,
we assert that the timetable for such an independent investigation must precede
any attempt to apply a "Code of Conduct" upon IFN Member Bodies which
have raised allegations, when there is the strong suspicion that this Code of
Conduct has been created in part to silence such allegations and cover up
wrongdoing within the IFN.
Yours
sincerely
The
Board of Trustees of the Interfaith Alliance UK*
Member
Body of the Inter Faith Network
23
September 2014
*The
Board of Trustees of the Interfaith Alliance UK are:
Danny
Diskin (Chair)
Alan
Bolwell
George
Barda
Kit
Klarenberg