In June the government returned to their parents the five children of Pentecostal Christians Marius and Ruth Bodnariu whom the Child Welfare Service (Barnevernet) had taken custody of in November 2015 on abuse charges for spanking, which is illegal. According to the family’s attorney, the Bodnarius admitted to spanking their children, but said the seizure was based on the anti-religious bias of the Barnevernet, which they said characterized their “Bible-based parenting style” as inhibiting their children’s development. After the children were returned to the parents, the abuse case remained pending, but the family left the country for Romania before it came up for trial.
On October 2, the government released an 11-point action plan to counter anti-Semitism in society. Representatives from a wide range of government ministries, the DMT, non-Jewish religious groups, and the Center for Studies of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities (HC) participated in the working group to develop the plan. The plan emphasized training and education programs, research on anti-Semitism and Jewish life in the country, and efforts to safeguard Jewish culture. The HC and the DMT were generally positive about the plan, highlighting as particularly important the inclusion of anti-Semitism as a separate category of hate crime in police statistics and institutionalization of a survey of anti-Semitic attitudes in the country to be conducted every five years (next in 2017).
The Ministry of Local Government and Modernization continued to provide one million Norwegian kroner (NOK) ($116,000) for security at the DMT facility and synagogue in Oslo, based on incidents in prior years. The DMT continued to maintain a dialogue with the Ministry of Justice and Public Security and the police aimed at ensuring the DMT’s facilities were properly safeguarded.
The Church of Norway received approximately 2 billion NOK ($232 million) in funding from the government. The government and the Church were reviewing the future status of Church employees, who would no longer be employees of the state after 2016, with regard to pensions and benefits. The government, however, planned to continue providing a large annual grant to the Church. The MOC stated the grant to the Church would initially increase after its employees were removed from the state payroll. Other registered religious and life-stance organizations would also continue to receive state grants totaling approximately 322 million NOK ($37 million). Some representatives from these other groups, including the Norwegian Humanist Association, stated the size of the grant to the Church of Norway was not based solely on the size of membership and signaled the Church’s privileged relationship with the state would last beyond the January 1, 2017 legal separation. In April the MOC began preparing a white paper on religion and life-stance policies, which remained under development at year’s end.
In November the Oslo District Court fined the Catholic Diocese of Oslo 1 million NOK ($116,000) and ordered it to begin repaying approximately 40 million NOK ($4.63 million) in excess government subsidies. It also found the diocese’s chief administrative officer guilty of fraud for inflating diocese membership numbers in order to receive extra subsidies. The diocese filed a civil suit against the government for unfair treatment in May, which remained pending at year’s end. According to the diocese, it received subsidies for 80,000 Catholics in 2015, while it actually had 136,000 members.
The national police unit for combating organized and other serious crimes continued to maintain a web page for the public to contact police regarding hate crimes and hate speech, including religiously motivated incidents. According to police and NGO reports and observation, religiously motivated hate speech, particularly online, continued to be a significant problem. A new national strategy against hate speech, released in November, emphasized improving national statistics on hate speech, including religiously-motivated speech, and associated crimes, and promoting education and research on such crimes and speech on the internet.
The government continued to ban the wearing of religious symbols, including headgear, with police uniforms.
The government continued to permit individual schools to decide whether to implement bans on religious clothing such as burqas or niqabs. Two university colleges, University College of Southeast Norway and Ostfold University College, maintained bans. In October some politicians, including the minister of education and research, expressed support in the media for a national ban on students wearing the burqa or niqab in school.
Many non-Christian religious organizations, such as the Norwegian Humanist Association, continued their objections to the specific reference to “Christian Knowledge” in the title of the mandatory school course on religion, stating it promoted Christianity over other religions.
The Ministry of Education continued grants for school programs raising awareness about anti-Semitism. Schools nationwide continued to observe Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27. High school curricula included material on the deportation and extermination of Jewish citizens from 1942 to 1945. The DMT received grants for a program where young Jews talked to high school students about Judaism and being a Jew in the country. The government indicated it planned to expand the program through the national action plan to counter anti-Semitism.
The government continued to support an extracurricular program that took some secondary school students to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland and to other Nazi concentration camps to educate them about the Holocaust.
In response to the effective ban on the production of kosher and halal meat in the country by the law on animal slaughter, the Ministry of Agriculture continued to waive import duties and provide guidance on import procedures to both the Jewish and Muslim communities.
The government continued to conduct workshops and other intervention programs targeting groups at risk for radicalization and to explore strategies to increase racial and religious tolerance. In September the government sponsored a national conference against radicalization, which included extensive participation by civil society and highlighted the country’s national plan to counter violent extremism, launched in 2014. In November the ombudsman for equality and antidiscrimination sponsored a conference on combating racial discrimination and intolerance. The discussion on hate speech (which disproportionately affected religious minorities) at the conference included active participation from representatives of faith-based and religious umbrella organizations.
Consistent with previous years, the MOC provided 12 million NOK ($1.4 million) to religious umbrella organizations such as the Islamic Council Norway, Christian Council of Norway, and the Council for Religious and Life Stance Communities (STL), among others, to promote dialogue and tolerance among religious and life-stance organizations. Groups outside these religious umbrella organizations also applied to the ministry for funding for specific programming.
To support government efforts to promote religious freedom outside of the country, the government appointed a new Special Envoy for freedom of religion and belief at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in September.
The government is a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.