WASHINGTON (ABP) — Several of the United States' allies remain among the world's most egregious violators of human rights, according to a non-partisan federal panel's report.
In addition, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom said, two nations whose oppressive governments U.S. forces have helped overthrow since 2001 — Iraq and Afghanistan — are in danger of joining that infamous list.
Commission members made public their 2006 annual report and recommendations during a May 3 press conference in Washington. The 1998 law that created the panel requires it to report annually on the status of religious liberty worldwide and recommend that the State Department name nations that commit or tolerate “severe and egregious” violations of religious freedom as “Countries of Particular Concern,” or CPCs. Administration officials retain ultimate authority to make those designations and impose appropriate sanctions.
Commissioners recommended the same 11 nations for CPC status that they did last year — Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
Although the commission has long recommended most of those nations for CPC status, the State Department has failed to follow that recommendation for Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and has been slow to take action against Saudi Arabia.
In September — a year after the State Department declared oil-rich Saudi Arabia a CPC — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice placed a 180-day waiver on implementing any sanctions against the Saudi government.
“This waiver expired in late March 2006,” said Nina Shea, the commission's vice chair and director of Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom. “As of today, no action with regard to Saudi Arabia has been announced by the U.S. government…. Since religious freedom conditions in Saudi Arabia have not substantially improved in the last year, the U.S. government should not hesitate in taking significant action.”
Shea said Saudi Arabia has not shown significant improvement on religious freedom since the State Department's 2004 CPC designation.
“It's really one of the dozen countries in the world that are among the worst persecutors, most egregious persecutors of religions of all kinds, including Muslims,” she said.
The Saudi government bans public worship by religious groups of any sort other than those following the state-sanctioned version of Sunni Islam. Shea said government officials occasionally raid even private Christian worship services, which are supposed to be legal.
State Department spokesman Chris Cooper, responding to an ABP reporter's inquiries, said May 4, “The matter of whether Saudi Arabia will be sanctioned or another waiver authorized still remains under review. However, we continue to urge Saudi Arabia to continue to make improvements on religious freedom.”
He said he did not know the specific status of Rice's decision-making process on the matter, but that the ultimate decision would be hers to make.
In Pakistan, the panel's 250-page report said, “Sectarian and religiously motivated violence persists…and the government's response to this problem, though improved, continues to be insufficient and not fully effective.”
The commission also called special attention to the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“In these two countries, where the United States is directly engaged in political reconstruction, the universal right to religious freedom is imperiled,” wrote Michael Cromartie, the commission's chairman, in a letter to Rice accompanying the report.
He noted several recent incidents in which Afghan citizens were charged with crimes — some carrying the penalty of death — for contradicting Islam. Cromartie also pointed out that lawless conditions in Iraq have led to regular sectarian violence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, as well as an atmosphere of fear that is causing many Christians and other religious minorities to flee the country in “an exodus that may mean the end of the presence in Iraq of ancient Christian and other communities that have lived on those same lands for 2,000 years,” he said.
Commissioner Preeta Bansal, a human-rights attorney, told reporters that the new Afghan Constitution, the make-up of the nation's judiciary, and the government's inability to impose order in large parts of the country outside Kabul have combined to worsen the situation there.
“Although conditions from freedom of religion or belief have certainly improved since the fall of the Taliban, they have become increasingly problematic over this past year,” she said.
Bansal said the nation's charter does not contain adequate safeguards for religious freedom — which endangers both minorities and the nation's religious majority. “The constitution contains no specific guarantee for the individual right of freedom of religion or belief,” she said. “The 99 percent of [Afghans who are] Muslims do not have a right to dissent from state-imposed orthodoxy.”
Southern Baptist Commissioner Richard Land noted the United States has to take special care to avoid similar problems in Iraq. “The commission has concluded that, because the United States has been so directly involved in Iraq's political reconstruction, it has a special obligation to act vigorously…to identify and promptly remedy the systemic flaws that continue to undermine the protection of fundamental human rights in Iraq,” he said, noting the regularity of attacks there against religious minorities as well as secularists, women, homosexuals and ethnic minorities.
The commission again recommended, as in the past, that a high-level foreign service official be assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to focus specifically on religious freedom and other human-rights concerns.
In response to reporters' questions about why President Bush's administration has seemed reluctant to take the panel's advice on nations like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, commissioners said there may be diplomatic reasons.
The full report is available on the commission's website at www.uscirf.gov.
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