Soviet Rights Group Urges Release of Jailed Believers

A Soviet human rights commission appealed to the government Tuesday to free the country’s remaining religious prisoners in a demonstration of its declared commitment to democracy and civil liberties.

The Commission of International Cooperation on Humanitarian Matters and Human Rights, an influential, reform-minded committee with official standing, argued that those jailed under laws severely restricting religious activities represent no political threat to the state or community and should be released from prison camps or internal exile.

‘No Longer a Danger’

“These people no longer pose any social danger to our society,” the commission said, avoiding the issue of their original imprisonment and emphasizing the greater political liberalism now. “It would be an act of lofty humanitarian significance if they were pardoned.”

According to Keston College, a British center that monitors religious freedom in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the number of religious prisoners here has declined to an estimated 180. More than 200 others have been released in the past year, including several prominent churchmen who were among the more than 20 freed in the last six weeks.

The proposed release would be one of the most dramatic steps yet in demonstrating the Soviet leadership’s stated commitment to honor fundamental human rights as part of its overall reform program.

The commission asked the Presidium of the country’s Parliament, the Supreme Soviet, specifically to pardon those convicted under two articles of Soviet law that restrict religious activities and to free them from prison or internal exile.

The commission’s highly publicized appeal, broadcast on state radio and television and distributed by the Soviet news agency Tass, appeared to lay the foundation for the release of most, if not all, of the country’s remaining religious prisoners.

Such a move, the commission said, would win approval across the country and abroad, where Moscow’s critics continue to cite the imprisonment of believers as evidence of political repression here.

Right to Their Beliefs

The commission, headed by Fyodor Burlatsky, a leading political scientist and an adviser to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, said that most religious believers are strong supporters of current government policies and that their right to religious beliefs should be honored.

“The majority of believers have accepted perestroika, “ the commission said, “and they have made a significant contribution to realizing plans for the social-economic development of the country. All this testifies to the new approach to government-church relations in the era of perestroika and the democratization of Soviet society.”

“ Perestroika, “ Gorbachev’s term for his sweeping political, economic and social reforms, is the new touchstone for what is--and is not--progressive, and religious belief is increasingly viewed as a matter of personal conscience rather than political and social deviance.

Gorbachev himself met with leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church in April in advance of the celebrations of the millennium of Christianity in the country, and at the special Communist Party conference in June, he demanded full acceptance of religious believers in Soviet society.

“Several hundred” new religious congregations have been officially recognized since January, according to both clergymen and government spokesmen. Churches that had been closed and taken over by the state for secular purposes are gradually being restored to religious use in many areas of the country.

Even the Hare Krishna movement, which spread to the Soviet Union in the 1970s, has benefited with the official registration of several of its groups as religious organizations and the freeing of most of its adherents, who had been jailed for illegal proselytizing.

A member of the Soviet human rights commission noted privately Tuesday that the government is drafting a broad “law of conscience” guaranteeing important civil liberties, including that of religious freedom, and consequently should free “any prisoners of conscience” in advance.

“To introduce the law at the next session of the Supreme Soviet would be worse than a joke if our prisons still held people convicted for their religious beliefs,” he said.

Further reforms are expected to follow passage of the new law, including repeal of the toughest laws on religious activity that date from the original crackdown on the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1920s and the subsequent closure of thousands of the country’s churches.

Religious activists in the western Ukraine report a new crackdown on the underground Ukrainian Catholic Church there, however.

Ivan Gel, a member of a committee seeking legalization of the Ukrainian church, said in an interview from Lvov that the crackdown began after several church services attracted thousands of people in July.

“There is, without a doubt, a sharp increase in pressure on the church--and not only on the church but on the whole society,” he told reporters.

Police have broken up some religious services, prevented rural residents from attending services in other villages and levied heavy fines on unauthorized services, Gel said.

The Ukrainian Catholic Church was stripped of its official standing after World War II, when Soviet officials charged its leaders with having collaborated with the German invaders.