76 percent of people live in regions or under regimes that restrict religious liberties according to Dr. Robert (Robbie) P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and the current chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). Dr. George presented USCIRF’s 2014 Annual Report to a group gathered at the National Endowment for Democracy on Friday, June 27.
The report, released on April 30 of this year, documents the USCIRF’s findings on the developments in religious freedom around the world over the past year and their recommendations to the State department regarding classifications of countries as violators of religious freedom. The USCIRF report, according to George, focuses “on the most seriously religious freedom violators and violations [and] provides recommendations to the US government for how to respond to these abuses and encourage reform.” The USCIRF does not merely point at threats or impositions to international religious liberty; it makes practical and realistic suggestions to confront the issues they highlight head on. George stated that the organization is not “utopian,” advocating for fix-all legislation and singular, universal solutions to international religious liberty crises.
The International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 created the USCIRF and granted them the authority to suggest which countries should be labeled as “Countries of Particular Concern” (CPCs) or “Tier 1” offenders, which are defined as nations “guilty of committing systematic, ongoing, and egregious abuses of religious freedom.” This year’s report included sixteen nations that the USCIRF recommends for designation as CPCs. Eight of these countries were recommended for redesignation, as they currently maintain CPC status: Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran (the commission sees worsening conditions despite the election of a “reform-minded” president last year), North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Uzbekistan (15,000 people were imprisoned in the last year for the peaceful practice of Islam).
The other eight countries were recommended for new designation as CPCs: Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan (which the USCIRF classifies as the most deserving of CPC status among those that have not already been designated as CPCs), Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Vietnam. Interestingly enough, the USCIRF has recommended several of these countries before, but the Department of State has never officially recognized them as CPCs. Vietnam had official CPC status in 2004 and 2005, but had the status removed after what George calls “genuine reform” in 2006. They have since returned to a worse level of religious persecution.
The report also includes “Tier 2” violators which meet at least one of the “systematic, ongoing, and egregious” criteria. The nations listed in the 2014 report include: Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Cuba, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Laos, Malaysia, Russia, and Turkey.
George highlighted a disturbing fact about these twenty-six nations: their combined population “easily exceeds four billion people.” George continues, “A significant majority of the world’s people live in nations with governments that perpetrate or tolerate severe religious liberty abuses.” George lamented the fact that the IRFA is not enforced regularly with inconsistent designations or failure to follow up on designations: “CPC designations become part of the wallpaper and nobody notices.”
After George’s presentation, he entered a dialogue with William (Bill) A. Galston, board member at the NED and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Galston asked George to clarify the distinction between freedom of religion and freedom of worship, to which George responded,
“Certainly the right to religious freedom centrally concerns the right to freedom of worship…Freedom of worship is part of freedom of religion but it’s not the whole of freedom of religion…In addition to the right to pray in one’s house of worship…there’s the right to enter the public square and share one’s views in a peaceful, nonaggressive way — to make one’s case for one’s faith…it also must include the right to change one’s religion…it’s one thing for apostasy to be a crime…under a canon law or religious code of some sort…but it really is another thing when the coercive power of the state is brought to bear.”
George later lamented more specifically over the lack of implementation of the IRFA, saying that religious freedom has taken second class status to other foreign relation concerns. He points to Pakistan as an example; the USCIRF has recommended Pakistan for designation as a CPC for thirteen straight years without any status change evidencing the trumping of political interests over human rights concerns.
George also expressed concern about the increasingly hostile conditions towards religious groups in the world, pointing to the increase in civil wars and religious extremism and that religion can become “the actual reason for the violence.” He emphatically repeated that religion can be a legitimate cause of violence, in contrast to the claims of sociologists of years past, who deny any role of religion in acts of violence.
See below for a link to the entire video of George’s presentation and his conversation with Galston.
Soli Deo Gloria
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