The guidelines for this meeting talks about best practices and under the particular heading of this session on political and religious associations，emphasis is placed on cults. I would therefore like to highlight a few cases related to religious organizations drawing on the case-law from the European Strasbourg system，i.e. the human rights organs under the Council of Europe but also on a couple of cases from the UN Human Rights Committee. These cases I have selected on the basis of relevance to the European context and to my understanding，also for the situation in China.

An experience I have from China triggered me to say a few things on this topic. I was based for a while in Shanghai starting in the early fall of 1999.That summer Falun Gong had just become well known，not the least for the Chinese political leadership. As I was trying to start an Aikido-dojo（Japanese martial art）in downtown Shanghai，I noticed that the authorities were very reluctant to let me rent a gym for this purpose. After some three months of discussion，correspondence and persuasion，I was finally given the permission. In the course of events，I understood that the reason for the seemingly hopeless red-tape was that they thought Aikido was a form of Falun Gong（the second character in Aikido is the same as the first one in Qi Gong，which is a part of the Falun Gong exercises but no other relation exist）.

In Europe，including the country where I am from，Sweden，has as most countries a number of what commonly is referred to as sects. Sects is a matter of special concern. The UN Special Rapporteur on religious freedom called for research in 2001 on how to define sects；the work has not yet been completed. The European human rights system has come to deal with such organizations on a number of occasions. Arguably the response by the Strasbourg system has not always been the best possible from a human rights perspective but it is after all a distilled form of European best practices and I will only discuss the more positive aspects of the outcome of the cases.

The cases selected deal with these organizations by way of delimiting the unavoidable grayzone between freedom of association and religion，and that of legitimate restrictions of such rights for the purpose of protecting health，moral or other rights. Sects in Europe at times are worrisome to many such as the so called “Sun-sect” centred in Switzerland that orchestrated mass-suicides some years ago. Religious groups of more ordinary nature such as the Church of Scientologist and Jehovah’s Witness are also to some extent in the grayzone of what should be permissible. Instead of an all-out prohibition of such organizations or prosecution of the actual membership of such a group，in Europe we instead restrict activities deemed unlawful.