Word: strasbourg
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...virus' transmissibility and did not take into consideration the severity of the strain. Wodarg blames the WHO for raising the alarm over a virus with little destructive potential, leading countries to embark on expensive mass-vaccination programs. He has organized a public parliamentary hearing on behalf of the Strasbourg-based human-rights group Council of Europe, titled "The Handling of the H1N1 Pandemic: More Transparency Needed?" The hearing, scheduled for Jan. 26, will explore the question of whether the WHO and governments overreacted to the threat of H1N1...
Keiji Fukuda, the WHO's special adviser on pandemic influenza, who will head a delegation to the Strasbourg hearing, counters that the WHO's definition of influenza pandemics has always been based on transmissibility and has never had anything to do with the lethality of a virus; it was no different with H1N1. In response to accusations of overreaction to what has amounted to a mild disease, Fukuda says that once the 2009 H1N1 pandemic had been declared, "WHO consistently made it clear that it could not predict the future course of the pandemic but consistently provided sober, balanced...
...Vatican, whose influence in Italy has helped maintain a role for Catholicism in public schools, including hiring church-approved teachers for religion hour, lashed out at what it called the latest "ideological" ruling from Strasbourg. "The court wanted to ignore the role of Christianity in forming Europe's identity, which was and remains essential," Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said in a statement on Nov. 3. "Religion gives a precious contribution to the formation and moral growth of people, and it's an essential component in our civilization. It's wrong and myopic to try to exclude it from education...
...recurring flare-ups between Italy and Strasbourg are both anomalous to and emblematic of the continental shift in faith. The Vatican's presence within its borders keeps Catholicism a part of the public life and social fabric in Italy, where only 23% of respondents answered "No" to the Gallup poll question. But the largely rhetorical battles like the one over crucifixes mask the reality that Italian life is ever more secular, and the ethnic and religious fabric is in fact undergoing major changes with the arrival of immigrants, including many from Muslim-majority countries. Buttiglione, who called the court...
...Still, the Strasbourg court cannot be accused of discriminating against Christianity in particular. In 2005, the human-rights court upheld a then long-standing ban on headscarves in public buildings in Turkey, a law that has since been eased by the current ruling Muslim party. And of course, beyond the halls of its European institutions, the city of Strasbourg is also in the heart of the ever more secularized French Republic, where students are forbidden from wearing headscarves or any other religious symbol in public schools. To U.S. and U.K. sensibilities, this ban continues to seem as strange as crucifixes...