On October 28, the heads of government of twenty-five European states gathered in a historic hall on Rome's Capitoline Hill to sign a constitutional treaty for the newly-expanded European Union (E.U.).

I am asked why, as a Jew, I have led this fight to keep the cross on the Los Angeles county seal. I have three responses.

For nearly thirty years, the phrase killing fields was synonymous with Cambodia. Between 1975 and 1979, the communist Khmer Rouge killed at least one million Cambodians in their attempt to reinvent their society.

Thanks to John Paul II, the Catholic Church has become aware of the fact that the experience of martyrdom is still extremely relevant. The "brief century," marked by totalitarianism, has left behind itself a long trail of Christian blood. But the third millennium also opens with the sign of martyrdom: a martyrdom with many faces that shows itself increasingly as a "global" experience.

Darfur would be Sudanese President Lt. General Omar Hassan al Bashir's second genocidal campaign against his countrymen. He waged the first against the Christian and animist people of south and central Sudan, with most of the deaths occurring over a decade beginning in the early '90s and 2002. As Elie Wiesel wrote about the south, it was "genocide in slow motion."

Although I had read many books on this subject during my youth, it was not until I was thirty years old that I met anyone who had seen first-hand the evidence of how brutal that Soviet persecution really was.

Today 800,000 Africans from Darfur, Sudan, have been driven from their homes by Arab militias, supported by Sudanese government air strikes, in the worst case of ethnic cleansing since Kosovo.

More than 160 million people in India are dalits or "Untouchables" people tainted by their birth into a caste system that deems them impure, less than human. Christian communities are helping India's untouchables and many of them are converting. But the Indian government is now proposing legislation that would give the very people who have oppressed the dalits for generations the authority to block their conversions.

Canada is not a totalitarian state, but the totalitarian impulse is very thinly disguised indeed, and the signs on the horizon are ominous.

With a price on her head in Azerbaijan and a prison sentence in Sudan, Baroness Caroline Cox is always in danger. Moving illegally across borders, to see firsthand "man's inhumanity to man," has become the life business of this extraordinary crusader for Christian rights.