WASHINGTON (ABP) — The State Department's annual report on the state of religious freedom around the globe stars the usual villains but also contains some new bright spots.
“In some countries, we find their leaders have modified laws and policies…or taken other concrete steps to improve,” said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, introducing the report at a press briefing Nov. 8. “In far too many countries, however, governments fail to safeguard religious freedom.”
In the document the State Department re-designated eight nations as “Countries of Particular Concern,” or CPCs, under the terms of the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act. They are Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Vietnam.
The designation is reserved for the world's most egregious violators of religious liberty. The terms of the law require administration officials to take measures — such as imposing sanctions — on such nations to encourage them to mend their ways.
The department recommended the same eight nations for CPC status last year.
The list includes totalitarian regimes — such as Iran and North Korea — with which the United States has little diplomatic leverage. However, it also includes several countries that are U.S. allies in the war on terrorism or are strong economic partners, such as China and Saudi Arabia.
Both Rice and U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom John Hanford noted that Saudi Arabia, China and Vietnam have made progress over the past year in improving conditions for religious freedom. In particular, both cited Vietnam for lifting restrictions on unregistered Protestant “house churches,” reducing barriers to religious groups conducting charitable activities, and relaxing control over promotion and transfer of clerics.
“This year, Vietnam has made some very significant efforts to improve religious freedom,” Hanford told reporters.
Rice said her department may remove Vietnam from the CPC list if the nation's “record of improvement continues.”
However, significant problems remain in even those three nations. The report still concludes, “Freedom of religion does not exist” in Saudi Arabia. And while China has improved in some respects, government officials continue to suppress the religious freedom of several groups — including Roman Catholics who maintain loyalty to the pope, unregistered or “underground” Protestant congregations, Uighur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists and other spiritual movements that the government considers subversive cults, such as the Falun Gong sect.
The report chastised several other nations, including longtime allies, for insufficient respect for full religious freedom. Among those was France, which has exploded in recent days with violence among young citizens of Arab and African descent who feel discriminated against in French society. Many of them are Muslims, while France's government is aggressively secularist.
The report also omitted some issues that have been cited by international religious-freedom observers. For instance, department officials again declined to name Pakistan a country of particular concern, despite repeated recommendations to do so from the non-partisan U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Anne Johnson, spokesperson for the religious-freedom commission, said she was disappointed the State Department again declined to name Pakistan a CPC. She noted, “The government of Pakistan continues to provide an inadequate response” to violence carried out by Muslim extremists against Pakistani Christians and other religious minorities.
She also said the Pakistani government's promises to curb the teaching of religious extremism in the nation's many madrassahs, or Muslim religious schools, “has failed to have much effect thus far.”
The report also did not mention the status of religious freedom in Afghanistan. While there are protections for religious freedom in the nation's new constitution, some religious-freedom activists have expressed concern that other provisions of the constitution and the make-up of Afghanistan's judiciary may render those protections toothless.
Hanford, responding to a question about Afghanistan, said the nation is improving since establishing democratic forms of government after U.S. forces overthrew the theocratic Taliban regime in 2002.
“In Afghanistan, we see a great deal of progress which has occurred,” he told reporters. “We are not finding the incidence of harassment that we were some months back. We are pleased that the [Afghan] Constitution confirms religious freedom and commits the government of Afghanistan to following international standards” for religious liberty.
Hanford also noted there are “one or two” other nations with which the State Department is still in negotiations regarding CPC status. However, he declined to say if Pakistan is one of those countries.
The full report is available on the State Department's website at www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf.