freedom of conscience

Le  PROGRES
20 February 2009

« Under the therapist cover, new sects are growing »

Georges Fenech is the president of MIVILUDES (Inter-ministerial Mission of vigilance and fight against sectarian drifts ».

Journalist:  Is Miviludes, whom you are the president, works on a new list?

Fenech: We are currently thinking about something – and we are only at that point- about the usefulness to have a general tool about the reprehensible practices about all the sectarian movements.

Journalist: So, a kind of list?

Fenech: No, this is not really about drawing a new list about the sectarian picture like in 1995, but it is more like to create a working tool. The final result of our work will be given to the Prime Minister at the end.

Journalist: Available to everybody?

Fenech: To the authorities and to citizens of course.

Journalist: Honestly, what will be the difference?

Fenech: It will not be a detailed list of all the movements that could be considered a sectarian ones, but it will be used to highlight the practices of certain movements that could be dangerous for the public health. We will not target anybody, but we will give explanations, through what could be a board of all difficulties and dangerousness encountered.
Thus, the public will be able to know the practices of such movements.

Journalist: Is there a kind of stagnation and a growth of the sectarian phenomenon?

Fenech: No stagnation, but at the contrary a multiplication of the pseudo therapeutic methods of movements, and in certain case, only single swindlers but who are doing victims.

Journalist: Can we speak about new trends?

Fenech: This is obvious these approaches with therapeutic methods are in development since  some times, that is worrying the Ministry of Health that is working on a watching tool.

Journalist: Can we evaluate the number of sectarian movements in the total number of adepts?

Fenech:  We get a lot of alerts but we don’t have the ability to do such evaluations. We can nevertheless mentions few examples: Only for the Hamer methods, we can estimate that there is at least a thousand persons who practice it.