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Alain Vivien is a French Socialist Party (PS) politician, best known for chairing (1998–2002) the French Mission Interministérielle pour la Lutte contre les Sectes, MILS, a ministerial organization designed to observe the activities of various religious organizations defined as "Sectes" (cults).
Freedom of religion in France is guaranteed by the constitutional rights set forth in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
The French National Assembly, the lower house of the Parliament of France, set up a Parliamentary Commission on Cults in France on 11 July 1995 following the events involving the members of the Order of the Solar Temple in late 1994 in the French region of Vercors, in Switzerland and in Canada. Chaired by deputy Alain Gest, a member of the Union for French Democracy conservative party, the commission had to determine what should constitute a cult. It came to categorize various groups according to their supposed threat or innocuity. The Commission reported back in December 1995.
The MIVILUDES is a French government agency, created by Presidential decree in 2002. It is charged with observing and analyzing the phenomenon of sectarian movements (cults), coordinating the government response, informing the public about the risks arising from sectarian aberrations and facilitating the implementation of actions to aid the victims.
The application of the labels "cults" or "sects" to religious movements in government documents usually signifies the popular and negative use of the term "cult" in English and a functionally similar use of words translated as "sect" in several European languages. Government reports which have used these words include ones from Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, and Russia. While these documents utilize similar terminology they do not necessarily include the same groups nor is their assessment of these groups based on agreed criteria. Other governments and world bodies also report on new religious movements but do not use these terms to describe them.
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CCMM may refer to:
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Nathalie Luca is a French research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), an anthropologist and a sociologist of religions. She is director of the Center for Studies on Social Sciences of the Religious (CéSor) at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS). She was co-editor-in-chief of the French review Archives de sciences sociales des religions.
The fight against the abuses committed by sects has taken an international scale since the beginning of the 1980s. In France, it is first of all associations like the ADFI who actively campaigned to denounce the existence of sects, from the 1970s, followed in 1983 by a report to the Prime Minister of deputy Alain Vivien and a first parliamentary committee in 1995, before the government officially committed in 1998 in this fight with the objective of "fighting sects" then, faced with certain criticisms, "to repress sectarian aberrations".
References
- ↑ Richardson, James T. (2004). Regulating Religion: Case Studies from Around the Globe. Springer Science & Business Media. pp. 42–43. ISBN 9780306478871.
- ↑ Richardson, James T. (2004). Regulating Religion: Case Studies from Around the Globe. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 73. ISBN 9780306478871.
- ↑ Lardeur, Thomas (22–28 August 2002). "Pourquoi la bataille anti-sectes a échoué?". VSD (in French).
- 1 2 "Sectes, les pourfendeurs se déchirent". Le Point (in French). 19 January 2009. Retrieved 12 August 2010.
- ↑ "Rapport au Premier ministre — Les dérives sectaires — Année 2003 — Mission interministérielle de vigilance et de lutte contre les dérives sectaires - MIVILUDES -" (PDF) (in French). MIVILUDES. p. 40. Archived from the original (pdf) on 5 May 2005. Retrieved 12 August 2010.
- ↑ "La lutte anti-secte pourrait conduire à imposer un "religieusement correct"" (in French). Liberté politique. 21 February 2001. Retrieved 12 August 2010.
