Profile of religious liberty growing, USCIRF says
- May 14, 2004 -
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom reported May 12 the cause for which it was established has gained a higher profile during the last five years.
The USCIRF, a bipartisan panel of nine members, gave its annual report, providing an update on the status of religious freedom in various countries. Congress created the commission in 1998 as an independent body to advise the White House and Congress.
USCIRF Commissioner Richard Land said, “There’s no question that this issue is far higher on our government’s radar screen and the radar screen of other governments around the world because of the existence of this commission.”
For one thing, the International Religious Freedom Act’s requirement that the State Department issue a yearly report on religious freedom has transformed some of the work of U.S. diplomats, said Land, the ERLC’s president.
“There has been the development of a significant cadre of career diplomatic corps officers who have been sensitized and made aware of this issue and of the abuses that are taking place around the world in a way that was not prevalent prior to 1998,” Land said. “[T]hey are listening to us, and they are listening more as they become more sensitized to the problem as a result of preparing these reports and having to interact with the people who have been victimized in the various countries where they serve.”
Despite the gains, the global need to combat religious persecution is growing, Land said. “My impression as a commissioner, and I’ve been serving three years now, is that the situation is getting worse, not better,” he said.
The commission remains concerned about developments regarding religious freedom in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein’s regime was deposed last year, and Afghanistan, where a radical Islamic government was unseated by another effort spearheaded by the United States, it said in its report.
The Afghan constitution adopted in January has a “crucial—and potentially fatal—flaw,” the panel said in its report. “Though the constitution provides for the freedom of non-Muslim groups to exercise their various faiths, it does not contain explicit protection for the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion that would extend to every individual—particularly to individual Muslims in Afghanistan, the overwhelmingly majority of the country’s population.”
In Iraq, a hopeful sign for religious liberty occurred in March, when freedom of conscience and religion was embraced in the release of the Transitional Administrative Law, the commission reported. The panel is concerned about language in the document that says laws cannot be opposed to the “universally agreed upon tenets of Islam.”
President Bush appointed Land to the panel. Land is serving his third and final year.
The USCIRF’s 2004 report can be accessed online at www.uscirf.gov .
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