More than two dozen leading human rights, religious freedom, and Christian advocacy groups are pressing Congress to take more action to persuade the Biden administration to reverse course and re-designate Nigeria to its blacklist of worst offenders when it comes to allowing citizens to practice their faith of choice.
The move is taking place as the State Department is expected to release its annual list of “Countries of Particular Concern,” those nations where religious freedom is severely limited or religious groups face persecution, in the coming days.
Based on the number of Christian deaths at the hands of terrorists and militant groups alone, the decision should be clear-cut, the advocates argue. More than 5,000 Nigerian Christians are reported to have been killed for their faith in 2022, according to a report by Open Doors, a religious freedom watchdog group.
Leaders of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, or USCIRF, a government-created independent body that monitors religious persecution around the world, met with Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this week in a meeting in which the organization’s commissioners pressed Blinken to place Nigeria back on the official U.S. blacklist.
Blinken removed Nigeria from the list in 2021, reversing a decision by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in December 2020 to designate the West African nation as a CPC.
Earlier this year, New Jersey GOP Rep. Chris Smith introduced legislation calling on the Biden administration to designate Nigeria as a CPC and appoint a special envoy to the country and the Lake Chad region to monitor and combat atrocities there. The measure is co-sponsored by Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat.
Continue reading at RealClear Politics here.
Congressman Chris Smith’s petition in the Congressional Record can be viewed here.
Text of the religious freedom advocates’ letter to members of Congress, signed by IRD President Mark Tooley and In Defense of Christians Executive Director Richard Ghazal is printed in full below.
December 12, 2023
Dear Members of Congress,
As religious freedom advocates and proponents, and leaders of grassroots organizations with millions of American members, we appeal to you to urgently respond to the Department of State’s failure to adequately address egregious, systematic, and ongoing religious persecution in Nigeria, as required by the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) of 1998.
We specifically urge Nigeria’s designation as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) under the IRFA and the appointment of a special envoy for Nigeria and the Lake Chad Region. Additionally, we urge you to support and cosponsor the bi-partisan legislation authored by Rep. Chris Smith and Rep. Henry Cuellar House Resolution 82, which calls for the State Department to carry out these two steps.
A staggering 90 percent of all the Christians killed for their faith worldwide last year were killed in Nigeria, according to Open Doors, an increase from the 80 percent it reported in 2021. Over 5,000 Nigerian Christians are reported to have been killed for their faith in 2022.
Most of this slaughter is now carried out by militants within the Fulani Muslim herder population, who have been allowed to act largely with impunity. While some Muslims have also been killed by the same forces, the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa found that, from October 2019 to September 2022, Christians in Nigeria were 7.6 times more likely to be killed and 6 times more likely to be abducted than Muslims by terrorist and militia groups, when taking into account their population’s proportions in Nigeria’s states.
Catholic priests, evangelical pastors, and Methodist bishops have been special targets of kidnapping by Fulani and unidentified gunmen, typically shouting “Allahu Akbar.” The pontifical organization, Aid to the Church in Need, reports that, since early 2022 alone, 100 Nigerian Catholic priests have been kidnapped and not yet freed, 20 of whom were murdered, with many of these attacks occurring on church grounds. Nigerian media also reports the kidnapping of two imams from their mosques in 2022. Since 2009, some 17,000 churches have been burned and attacked, while many of them — such as St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Ondo State that was attacked on Pentecost Sunday last year — were filled with worshippers. We are not aware of a single case that has been prosecuted.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom reports that in “northcentral Nigeria, ethnonationalists fighting to promote Fulani interests target Christian civilians based on ethnoreligious identity.” In recommending CPC designation, it concludes that the Nigerian Government has “routinely failed to investigate these attacks and prosecute those responsible, demonstrating a problematic level of apathy on the part of state officials.”
In addition, terror groups such as Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province have attacked and killed thousands of Christians and Muslims who reject their dictates. Unknown numbers of Christian girls and women have been kidnapped into sexual slavery. Boko Haram kidnapped over 200 schoolgirls in 2014 in Chibok, Borno State, half of whom remain captive and are pressured to convert to Islam, while Leah Sharibu remains enslaved following a terrorist raid of her school in Dapchi, Yobe State, in 2018.
Lawlessness has resulted in millions of internally displaced Nigerians and hundreds of thousands of refugees. Just this year, in Nigeria’s north central Benue State, whose population is overwhelmingly
Christian, nearly two million farming families were displaced by Fulani militants. Some of them were then hunted down in their places of refuge and brutally hacked to death. Catholic Bishop Wilfred Anagbe of Benue’s Makurdi diocese recently shared video documentation of the aftermath of one such attack with numerous Members of Congress.
Authorities also engage directly in religious persecution by enforcing Islamic blasphemy laws that have resulted in recent death sentences for Sufi musician Yahaya Sharif-Aminu and two Muslim clerics, and “religious insult” laws that led to a 24-year sentence for Nigeria’s Humanist Association head, Mubarak Bala. Moreover, these laws have been accompanied by a routine grant of impunity for extrajudicial attacks against their perceived violators. Last year, there was the unprosecuted mob killing of student Deborah Emmanuel Yakubu after she was accused of blasphemy and the unprosecuted serious death threats against the Sultan of Sokoto, Sokoto’s Catholic bishop, and Rhoda Jatau, a Christian woman, all three of whom were targeted for expressing disapproval of Yakubu’s murder.
IRFA requires frank assessments in the face of such grave religious freedom violations. The Secretary of State should acknowledge that Nigeria has “engaged in or tolerated” severe religious freedom violations, the statutory criteria warranting CPC designation. This is particularly important since the United States is a major partner of Nigeria, having given it over $1 billion in foreign aid in 2022, alone.
As Africa’s most populous country and its largest economy, Nigeria wields significant influence in Sub- Saharan Africa. By allowing religious persecution to proliferate within its borders, Nigeria is compounding already heightened regional insecurity. Both American interests and the International Religious Freedom Act require a response. We view the passage of the bi-partisan House Resolution 82 as an essential first step.
Sincerely,
David Curry
President and CEO Global Christian Relief
Governor Sam Brownback
Former Ambassador for International Religious Freedom
Co-Chair, International Religious Freedom Summit
Dr. Katrina Lantos Swett
President
Lantos Foundation for Human Rights & Justice
Co-Chair, International Religious Freedom Summit
Nina Shea
Senior Fellow and Director
Center for Religious Freedom, Hudson Institute
Kristen Waggoner
President and CEO
Alliance Defending Freedom
Tony Perkins
Chairman
Family Research Council
Leonard Leo
Former Chair
US Commission on International Religious Freedom
F. Brent Leatherwood
President
Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission Southern Baptist Convention
Congressman Frank Wolf
Former Member of Congress 1981-2015, Retired
George Weigel
Distinguished Senior Fellow Ethics and Public Policy Center
Mary Ann Glendon
Former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See
Learned Hand Professor of Law, emerita Harvard University
Eric Patterson
President
Religious Freedom Institute
Jane Adolphe
Founder & Executive Director International Catholic Jurists Forum
Jeff King
President
International Christian Concern (ICC)
The Rt. Rev. Julian Dobbs
Diocesan Bishop
The Anglican Diocese of the Living Word
Anglican Church in North America
Timothy R. Head
Executive Director
Faith and Freedom Coalition
Dr. Randel Everett President
21 Wilberforce
Stephen S. Enada
Executive President
International Committee on Nigeria
Faith McDonnell
Director Katartismos Global
John Stonestreet
President
Colson Center for Christian Worldview
Kelly Monroe Kullberg
Director
American Association of Evangelicals (AAE)
Robert Nicholson
President and Founder
Philos Project
Amanda Bowman
Chair
The Catholic Herald Institute
Gregory H Stanton
Founding President
Genocide Watch
Kathryn Jean Lopez
Senior Fellow
National Review Institute
Alejandro Chafuén
Founder
International Freedom Educational Foundation
Mark Tooley
President
Institute on Religion and Democracy
Dede Laugesen
Executive Director
Save the Persecuted Christians
Richard Ghazal
Executive Director
In Defense of Christians
Comment by David S. on December 14, 2023 at 3:52 pm
Interesting thing about this list…where are all the mainline denominational officials who are usually so quick to denounce Israel? Do I see the names PC(USA)’s Jimmie Hawkins Office of Public Witness or Acting Stated Clerk Bronwen Boswell; Michael Curry of TEC, Elizabeth Eaton of ELCA, Roland Fernandes or John Hill of UMC, the current president of NCC, Teresa Hord Owens of the Christian Church, Dr. C. Jeff Woods of ABC, or Dr. Karen Georgia Thompson of UCC?
Now it could be that the groups on this list are more Evangelical or orthodox Confessional Protestants, so that could be one explanation for the lack of any obvious names or organizations within the mainline. Yet, at the same time, considering there were dueling statements in mid-November either Hamas friendly from mostly mainline and leftist churches or Israel friendly from Evangelical and Confessional Protestants, what is preventing the mainline from making statements on this? Why advocate so vigorously for the plight of (principally) Palestinian (Muslims), yet the mainline and their leftists allies are silent over the plight of Christians and others in Nigeria? (To its credit, the PC(USA) does speak out on South Sudan, but I cynically believe that the only reason that denomination does so is because it has mission partners in the region, otherwise…)