Ten days ago, a ban on residential Koranic schools was unthinkable. On Saturday evening, the government will nevertheless give it a go. Jon Helgheim of the Progress Party doesn’t believe the government for a second.
“What on earth is this government up to?” writes Helgheim on Facebook.
On Saturday evening, Lene Vågslid (Labour), Minister for Children and Families, announced on Dagsrevyen that the government intends to ban or regulate overnight accommodation for children in religious and philosophical communities. A working group comprising six ministries will look into the matter, reports NRK.
Less than two weeks earlier, the message had been the opposite. On 23 September, Vårt Land that the government had lifted the ban. Vågslid justified this by stating that a ban could constitute unequal treatment on the grounds of religion and breach the prohibition of discrimination in the European Convention on Human Rights.
Two weeks later, it is no longer a breach of the Convention on Human Rights.
Helgheim, who chairs the Justice Committee in the Storting, calls the U-turn a sleight of hand.
– ‘What happened to the claim that it wasn’t possible? This isn’t credible, and is probably just another sleight of hand to pretend that they are taking the suffering of young people seriously,’ he writes.
In April 2020, a unanimous Storting called on the government to propose legislative amendments that would ban permanent after-school programmes involving overnight stays over extended periods. The aim was to prevent segregation, parallel societies, negative social control and radicalisation. The backdrop to this was the revelations concerning the programmes run by the Islamic Cultural Centre in Oslo, Drammen and Nedre Eiker.
Six years later, there is still no ban.
– Six years of dithering, flimsy excuses and dithering over imams’ rights have probably ruined the youth of many young people, writes Helgheim.
He believes that the Minister failed to answer which takes precedence: children’s rights or those of the Muslim communities, when she was asked on Dagsrevyen.
“It makes me sick,” he writes.
The case gained fresh momentum this summer when the daughter of an imam associated with the Islamic Cultural Centre spoke out in *Aftenposten* and described the conditions at the Koran school where she was living. The State Administrator is now investigating the cultural centre’s accommodation facilities in Drammen.
Speaking to NRK, Vågslid says that the problem lies in a legal grey area, and that the government will take a broader view of it than before.
Helgheim dismisses the human rights argument.
– I couldn’t care less if a ban on boarding Quran schools, where pupils are subjected to coercion and threats, infringes on the rights of Muslim communities. If that is the case, then those are rights not worth protecting, he writes.
The Progress Party (FrP) has announced that it will table a bill with the same wording as the 2020 parliamentary resolution.
“We must now start standing up for what is important in this country, and that is not the right of Muslim communities to oppress children and young people!” writes Helgheim.
