PROVO — BYU law professor Cole Durham has a lot of friends.

Tuesday afternoon in a large classroom at BYU's law school, about a dozen foreign dignitaries swarmed Durham, cameras in hand, all of them desiring a picture with the bespectacled professor as a memento of their trip to the United States.

Prior to each photograph, instead of intonating the usual "cheese," Durham and his fellow photo subject smiled to the name of the visitor's country.

"Ukraine."

Flash.

"Kazakhstan."

Beep.

"Jordan."

Click.

The men and women pining for a picture with Durham were among the 70 attendees from 40 nations at BYU for the 16th annual International Law and Religion Symposium. They represented a small sampling of the myriad friendships Durham has formed over the years in the course of his exhaustive travels promulgating the cause of constitution-based religious freedom.

The three-day event, sponsored by the Durham-directed International Center for Law and Religion Studies, concluded Tuesday with a plenary session moderated by Durham and University of Utah president Michael K. Young.

Young, a BYU graduate and former Columbia law professor who twice chaired the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, has published several articles on the topic of religious freedom.

"I think there are few issues more important than freedom of thought and conscience," Young said. "It is so fundamentally central to human beings because it is a bellwether for so many other rights. If you don't protect this right, you don't protect anything else.

"This is in many ways the most threatening right, so it's the most vulnerable," he said. "And yet it protects what is the most important to most people."

Young said 80 percent to 90 percent of the world's population probably "thinks about who they are and where they came from, what they're supposed to be doing, through the prism of a faith-based perspective."

"If that perspective is not permitted to be freely considered and flourish and practiced, it really denies at a very fundamental level what is most tangential to being a human being," he said.

"One of the unique things this time," Durham said, "is that we focused on the different communities of discourse and how different types of groups interact in working on religious freedom. I think that was what made it distinctive."

The theme of this year's symposium was "Connecting Communities of Discourse: How the Judiciary, Academia, Government and International Institutions Further the Work of Religious Freedom."

e-mail: jaskar@desnews.com