The State Department’s annual report on the state of religious freedom around the globe stars the usual villains but also contains some new bright spots. “In some countries, we find their leaders have modified laws and policies … or taken other concrete steps to improve,” said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, introducing the report at a press briefing Nov. 8. “In far too many countries, however, governments fail to safeguard religious freedom.”
In the document, the State Department redesignated eight nations as “Countries of Particular Concern,” or CPCs, under the terms of the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act. They are Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Vietnam.
The designation is reserved for the world’s most egregious violators of religious liberty. The terms of the law require administration officials to take measures — such as imposing sanctions — on such nations to encourage them to mend their ways.
The list includes totalitarian regimes — such as Iran and North Korea — with which the United States has little diplomatic leverage. It also includes, however, several countries that are U.S. allies in the war on terrorism or are strong economic partners, such as China and Saudi Arabia.
Both Rice and U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom John Hanford noted that Saudi Arabia, China and Vietnam have made progress over the past year in improving conditions for religious freedom. In particular, both cited Vietnam for lifting restrictions on unregistered Protestant “house churches,” reducing barriers to religious groups conducting charitable activities and relaxing control over promotion and transfer of clerics.
Significant problems remain, however, in even those three nations. The report still concludes, “Freedom of religion does not exist” in Saudi Arabia.
And while China has improved in some respects, government officials continue to suppress the religious freedom of several groups — including Roman Catholics who maintain loyalty to the pope, unregistered or “underground” Protestant congregations and other spiritual movements that the government considers subversive cults, such as the Falun Gong sect.
The report chastised other nations, including longtime allies, for insufficient respect for full religious freedom. Among those was France, which has exploded in recent days with violence among young citizens of Arab and African descent who feel discriminated against in French society. Many of them are Muslims, while France’s government is aggressively secularist.
The report also omitted some issues that have been cited by international religious-freedom observers.
For instance, department officials again declined to name Pakistan a country of particular concern, despite repeated recommendations to do so from the bipartisan U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
(ABP)
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