Panel urges U.S. to press China on religious liberty
- Nov 15, 2005
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has urged the federal government to communicate a “consistent, candid and coordinated message” to China that it needs to reverse the deteriorating conditions for religious freedom and other human rights in the world’s most populous country.
Reporting Nov. 9 on its two-week trip to China, USCIRF found a crackdown continues on unapproved religious groups and called on Washington to take a variety of steps to influence reform under the communist regime.
“The commission finds that the Chinese government continues to systemically violate the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion or belief, contravening both the Chinese constitution and international human rights norms,” the bipartisan panel said in its report. “The room for political openness, public activism and greater civil and individual freedoms is narrowing in China.”
The Chinese government especially suppresses Protestant Christians and Roman Catholics in unregistered, or underground, churches, as well as Tibetan Buddhists, Uighur Muslims and the Falun Gong, a meditation sect.
The commission called on President Bush to press Chinese leaders for change on religious liberty and other human rights when he meets with them soon in Beijing. The President is scheduled to be in China Nov. 19-21.
Among the USCIRF’s recommendations to the U.S. government are: (1) Urge Beijing to end its suppression of religious groups and its efforts to force religious adherents to renounce their beliefs, and to release prisoners held because of their faith; (2) bring up China’s human rights abuses before United Nations bodies and at other multi-national meetings; (3) implement a March agreement with China in which parents would have the right to educate their children based on their religious beliefs and underage children would have the liberty to practice their faith, and (4) continue to press Beijing to protect North Korean refugees who flee to China for asylum.
ERLC President Richard Land, a USCIRF commissioner, said all of the recommendations are important, “because together the whole is more than the sum of the parts. And we hope that taken together that these policies will be a tsunami wave that will go over [the] top and then undermine the levees of intolerance and persecution.”
Land, one of seven commissioners on the two-week trip in August to China, said the report is “a candid assessment of what we found when we were there, that there is significant religious repression and significant discrimination and persecution of people of religious faith who refuse to dot the i’s and cross the t’s and live within the government’s onerous and repressive regulations.”
The USCIRF’s report and recommendations on China may be accessed online at its website, www.uscirf.gov .
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