Caroline Cox - Baroness Cox of Queensbury, to give her her full title - is, by any account, a remarkable woman.A humanitarian activist, she is founder and chief executive of HART (Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust), which helps oppressed people neglected by other organisations and ignored by the international media. She is president of Christian Solidarity UK, as well as supporter of countless other organisations.
She has entered war zones under fire. She has travelled secretly to countries where foreigners and aid organisations were not permitted. She has spoken up for persecuted Christians in Burma, Indonesia, Nigeria and Sudan. As a result of her work, she has received honorary doctorates from universities on several continents.
She has taken medical supplies to Communist Poland, Romania and the Soviet Union. She has made something like 60 journeys to Armenia with medical supplies, many of them in violent times when young men were being beheaded and little girls cut in half and left hanging on trees.
Despite being sentenced in absentia by the National Islamic Front for illegally entering Sudan, where more than two million people were displaced and an estimated 400,000 killed, she continued to make trips there.
On one visit, Islamists had passed through days before, killing unarmed men and enslaving women and children. Bodies were everywhere. She met a Christian whose farm had been destroyed, his church attacked, his brother and his brother-in-law killed and his sister captured as a slave.
"We feel completely on our own," he said. "You are the only Christians who have even visited us for years. Doesn't the church want us any more?"
"I sat under a tree," said Baroness Cox, "and wept."
Baroness Cox has now introduced a bill in the House of Lords which would allay fears that the estimated 85 sharia courts set up by Muslims in the UK are beginning to adjudicate in matters of criminal and family law. She has no desire, she says, to interfere with internal religious issues or prevent arbitration for people who want it. But the bill would make it a criminal offence to pretend to be able to adjudicate in criminal or family matters or to discriminate against women.
The Islamic Sharia Council has published a statement suggesting that Baroness Cox doesn't know what she's talking about.
Her bill will have its second reading in the Lords before very long. It is unlikely to become law. I would think that for it to do so it would need the support of some very principled politicians.
Whether Baroness Cox's bill reaches the statute book or not, I wish her well.
