Honolulu lawyer Jim Hochberg sent this article to my attention yesterday, from the website http://www.constitutionallycorrect.com/, which is a publication website of Alliance Defense Fund.

I suppose that all the work on behalf of German homeschoolers by HSLDA and concerned homeschoolers and Christians throughout the world has been in vain. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled to affirm the initial decision of the court in Frieburg, which has been upheld throughout the appeals process. The website article outlines the original decision as follows:

The court gave lip service to the parents' religious and educational freedom, but said that the government's desires trumped both. In particular, the government wanted the children to interact with other children *on the government's terms*, in public school, with "children from all backgrounds." Even worse, the court said that the parents were violating Rebekka's and Josua's "rights." You see, Rebekka and Josua "were unable to foresee the consequences of their parents' decision" to protect their religious upbringing. Thus the children's pre-maturity was not a reason to defer to their parents' wishes, but was a way to impose the government's child-raising decisions on the whole family. Never mind that Rebekka and Josua are also too young to judge the consequences of government-compelled enculturation. Heads, government wins; tails, parents lose.

They note that the ECHR court added even more disturbing rhetoric:

...the government's interest in "safeguarding pluralism in education," which "must be realized" through government schools, not only trumps parents rights but is itself a right of children that parents cannot infringe. Moreover, society has an interest in "avoid[ing] the emergence of parallel societies based on separate philosophical convictions and . . . integrating minorities into society."

They go on to speculate on the possibility of the United States granting asylum to homeschoolers from Germany.

What a sad day for freedom.