WASHINGTON (ABP) — An independent federal panel charged with monitoring global conditions for religious liberty has once again elevated an evangelical scholar and leader as its chairman.
The United States Commission for International Religious Freedom also elected a Southern Baptist agency head and a prominent human-rights lawyer as vice-chairs for 2007-2008.
Michael Cromartie will serve for the next year as chairman of the bipartisan panel. Cromartie, who was appointed to the commission by President Bush, is vice president of the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he heads programs on religion, media and evangelicals in civic life.
Cromartie, a graduate of Covenant College and American University, has spoken and written frequently for Christian and secular news outlets including Christianity Today, National Public Radio and the Washington Times. He also served as USCIRF chairman and vice-chair.
The commissioners elect a new chairperson annually and follow a tradition of alternating between Democratic and Republican appointees. Cromartie replaces Felice Gaer, director of the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights of the American Jewish
Committee. She was appointed to the panel by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
The incoming and outgoing chairs traded compliments, according to an announcement from the panel.
“In his three years on the commission, as well as throughout his professional life, Michael Cromartie has manifested a strong and continuing commitment to advancing the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief,” Gaer said, according to the statement. “The challenges to these and related freedoms of expression and association are more virulent than ever.”
Cromartie praised his predecessor's work over the past year, which included official commission visits to Saudi Arabia and Turkey, special reports on Russia and Bangladesh, and an increasingly urgent focus on the perilous status of religious freedom in Iraq.
“Her unique insights and leadership helped keep the Commission's work front and center in the vital effort to end repression worldwide — and particularly to end severe violations of human rights targeted at religious minorities or in the name of religion,” Cromartie said of Gaer.
The panel also elected as vice chairs Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and Preeta Bansal, a New York attorney now in private practice who once served as that state's solicitor general.
USCIRF, established as a result of the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, is charged with auditing the status of religious freedom around the world and making recommendations to U.S. policy-makers when it finds violations.
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Religious freedom commission elects evangelical as chairman (7/14/2005)