DUSHANBE, Tajikistan — Tajikistan’s Parliament is to debate a proposed Law on Religion, which, if passed, would be the most repressive of all the central Asian religion laws. The draft was prepared by the state committee for religious affairs.
Muslim, Russian Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant and Jehovah’s Witness leaders have all expressed deep concerns over many aspects of the draft law.
Amongst the violations of international human rights standards that the law proposes are a ban on unregistered religious activity, the highest threshold in the Commonwealth of Independent States for numbers of citizens to register a religious community, restricting the numbers of mosques, banning evangelism or proselytism, banning the teaching of religion to all children under 7, state control over who can teach religion within religious communities and their education, state control of organizing Muslim pilgrimages to Mecca and a ban on foreigners — such as Catholic priests — leading religious communities.
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