This European spending has been led mainly by two groups that focus their fights on the courts. One of these is the ACLJ organisation headed by Trump’s personal lawyer Jay Sekulow who, along with Rudy Giuliani, will be coordinating any legal challenges brought by Trump to the result of the US election on 3 November.
Another half-dozen ACLJ lawyers were also part of Trump’s defence team in impeachment proceedings earlier this year.
The ACLJ’s European branch (the ECLJ) has intervened in two cases to defend Italy’s position against gay marriage. It has also intervened in at least seven cases involving Poland, including at the European Court of Human Rights, to defend that country’s conservative policies including against divorce and abortion.
Last week, Poland’s constitutional court voted to restrict access to abortion in cases of fatal foetal anomalies. Sekulow’s group submitted arguments in favour of the new restrictions.
A second US conservative legal group involved in such cases is Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). Based in a small town in Arizona, it is also closely linked to the Trump administration through former staffers and frequent meetings.
ADF went to the US Supreme Court last year to defend non-profit donor secrecy. The case is still ongoing. Its few known funders include the family foundations of Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos, which are also major Republican party donors.
Financial secrecy
The full extent of US religious right funding for global activities is hidden, given that many Christian conservative organisations are registered as church organisations that do not have to disclose any of this information.
For some groups in openDemocracy’s data – notably the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association – US financial filings are only available for a small number of years. This group re-registered as an association of churches in 2015.
Sekulow has come under scrutiny over his financial practices since the 1980s when he was a tax lawyer specialised in creating tax shelters for Atlanta’s elite.
Earlier this year, the Associated Press revealed that Sekulow’s groups, including the ACLJ, had paid more than $65 million in charitable funds to Sekulow, his family members and corporations they own, fuelling a well-documented opulent lifestyle including expensive cars and high-end real estate.
In 2018 alone, the ACLJ spent $6 million on legal services provided by the CLA Group, a for-profit law firm in which Sekulow holds a 50% stake. This is the same firm that is understood to be contracted by Trump. It only has a mailbox address, however, and Sekulow is believed to do his work for Trump from the ACLJ’s offices.
American Institute of Philanthropy president Daniel Borochoff has said: “Regulators should investigate whether or not charitable resources, such as office, labor, equipment, etc, are being wrongly utilised to benefit Sekulow’s for-profit law firm.”
The US website Charity Navigator, which rates non-profits, has attached an orange “moderate concern” label to its entry for the ACLJ because of “atypical financial reporting issues”. These include millions of dollars that the ACLJ has paid over the years to Sekulow’s for-profit legal firm.
Global outcry
Several of these US Christian right groups have also been linked to COVID-19 misinformation. The anti-abortion Population Research Institute (PRI), for example, is led by an ultra-conservative activist who claims COVID-19 was man-made in a Chinese lab, and also sits on an anti-China lobby group with Steve Bannon.
Another group, Family Watch International (FWI), has been training African politicians, religious and civil society leaders for years to oppose comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) and LGBT rights across the African continent.
UNAIDS executive director Winnie Byanyima, from Uganda, told openDemocracy that “CSE is an integral part of the right to education and to health. It is not optional. It is not negotiable.”
South African gender rights group The Other Foundation also said that it has witnessed how US religious right funding has been used to “stir a backlash to the pursuits for freedom, dignity and equality of LGBTIQ people”.
It said, “the government has a duty to frown upon and act against any agenda that undermines its country’s constitution”, which in South Africa forbids discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
Alejandra Cárdenas, director of global legal strategies at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said openDemocracy’s findings “prove a manipulation we’ve been seeing for years by the US Christian right in Latin America and Africa, meant to break the social fabric and human rights protections that popular movements fought for”.
Print
Claire Provost Nandini Archer | Radio Free (2020-10-27T07:00:18+00:00) Revealed: $270m million ‘dark money’ spent by US Christian right groups globally. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/10/27/revealed-270m-million-dark-money-spent-by-us-christian-right-groups-globally/
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