WASHINGTON (ABP) — A federal panel charged with monitoring religious freedom worldwide is asking the Bush administration to take sanctions against Pakistan, Uzbekistan and several other nations for severe violations.
Members of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom released their 2005 annual report and recommendations to the State Department at a May 11 press conference in Washington. The 1998 law that created the commission requires it report annually on the status of religious liberty worldwide and recommend nations that commit or tolerate “severe and egregious” violations be named “Countries of Particular Concern,” or CPCs.
Commissioners recommended 11 nations for CPC status — including, for the first time, Uzbekistan. They re-recommended as CPCs 10 other nations named last year — Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkmenistan and Vietnam.
Members of the independent, bipartisan panel chose not to re-recommend CPC status for India. Although the commission tagged India with that status last year in a split decision, the group this year cited losses in India's nationwide elections by the Hindu fundamentalist party, whose regional officials have tolerated some violations of religious freedom.
According to Preeta Bansal, the commission's chair, focusing on religious liberty is important in the age of the global war on terrorism. “Promoting religious freedom and related human rights abroad is vital to U.S. foreign policy and to our strategic, as well as humanitarian, interests,” she said, in announcing the recommendations. “It is only in protecting the universal human rights of each individual that all individuals and all communities around the world will be secure.”
The law that created the commission requires the State Department to act on the CPC designations within a set amount of time, and enact sanctions on countries it agrees are severe religious-freedom violators, unless the United States has already taken measures against those countries.
Several of the nations cited as severe religious-freedom violators — such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia — have been close allies of the United States in fighting terrorism. Although the commission has recommended CPC status for Saudi Arabia for several years, only last fall did the State Department act on the recommendation. It has not yet acted on repeated CPC recommendations for Pakistan.
According to the commission's report:
* Burma is recommended as a country of particular concern because the nation's ruling military junta “uses a pervasive internal security apparatus to monitor the activities of all religious organizations. The government imposes restrictions on many religious practices, controls and censors all religious publications, and, in some areas of the country, forcefully promotes the majority religion over other religions.”
* China is recommended because “the government continues to be responsible for pervasive and severe violations of religious freedom and related human rights,” particularly against religious minorities, Catholics loyal to papal authority and unregistered Protestant groups.
* Eritrea is recommended because its government “continues to ban the activities of all unregistered religious groups and [has] closed their places of worship. It has arrested participants at prayer meetings and other gatherings, and detained members of unregistered churches and other religious activists for long periods and without charge.”
* Iran is recommended because the government has encouraged “prolonged detention, torture and execution of persons based primarily or entirely upon the religion of the accused. Over the past year, the Iranian government's poor religious-freedom record has deteriorated, particularly for Muslims who oppose the regime's interpretation of Islam, Baha'is and Christians — all of whom have faced intensified harassment, detention, arrests, and imprisonment.”
* North Korea is recommended because it continues to be one of the most oppressive regimes on earth, where there is “no protection for human rights,” and “[f]reedom of religion or belief is essentially non-existent, as the government severely represses public and private religious activities and has a policy of actively discriminating against religious believers.”
* Pakistan is recommended because its government “does not provide an adequate response to vigilante violence frequently perpetrated by Sunni Muslim militants against Shi'a [Muslims], Ahmadis, Hindus and Christians.” The nation also has an anti-“blasphemy” law under which allegations, even when false, “result in the lengthy detention, imprisonment of, and sometimes violence against Ahmadis and Christians as well as Muslims, some of whom have been sentenced to death.”
* Sudan is recommended because the government continues to commit violations of religious rights “against Christians, Muslims who do not follow the government's extremist interpretation of Islam, and followers of traditional African religions.” While the report says conditions have improved somewhat since the end of the nation's long-running civil war between its northern and southern regions, Sudanese officials are now encouraging atrocities in its western Darfur region, “where the government has exploited ethnic and religious differences in committing abuses against African Muslim civilians that the State Department has found to be genocide.”
* Saudi Arabia is recommended because its government “not only persists in banning all forms of public religious expression other than that of the government's own interpretation of one school of Sunni Islam, but also continues to be involved in financing activities throughout the world that support extreme religious intolerance, hatred and, in some cases, violence toward non-Muslims and disfavored Muslims.”
* Uzbekistan is recommended because “the Uzbek government continues to exercise a high degree of control over the manner in which the Islamic faith is practiced” and because of a restrictive new religious-registration law “that severely limits the ability of religious communities to function.”
* Vietnam is recommended because its government “continues to harass, detain, imprison and discriminate against leaders and practitioners of all religious communities,” especially the United Buddhist Church of Vietnam and Christians from the Montagnard and Hmong ethnic groups in the nation's central highlands.