U.S. to Name Official to Focus on Religious Liberty Issues

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced Friday that she is creating a high-level post in the State Department to ensure that concerns about religious liberty around the world are addressed in all aspects of U.S. foreign policy.

The step was recommended by the Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad, and Albright endorsed it only minutes after receiving the panel’s report.

“I am taking immediate action on the report’s first and most important recommendation,” she said at a news conference. “I will designate a new senior-level coordinator . . . to ensure that our efforts to advance religious freedom are integrated successfully into our broader foreign policy. . . . In this way, we can assure the American people and the committee that its best ideas will be brought to life, not studied to death.”

The 20-member committee--including Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Bahai religious leaders and academic experts--made almost 100 other recommendations intended to focus U.S. government policy on religious persecution, potentially one of the hot-button issues of the post-Cold War world.

The committee said the Clinton administration should consider positive as well as negative inducements to promote religious freedom. For instance, the report said, countries that improve their record on religious tolerance could be promised foreign aid, trade preferences, diplomatic support and high-level visits by U.S. leaders. Countries that continue persecution could be threatened with economic sanctions.

But the committee said it was not yet ready to recommend a broad policy on sanctions because it said it had not yet fully studied the complex issue. The panel promised more thorough treatment of the subject in its next report late this year.

Although the language of the report was generally bureaucratic and antiseptic--in contrast to the often-lurid prose of recent books on religious persecution--the committee cited 14 countries that it said were among the worst offenders. It emphasized that the list could have been much longer.

The committee’s approach differed greatly from legislation pending in Congress, and opposed by the administration, that would impose virtually automatic sanctions on countries that practice religious persecution as a matter of government policy or that fail to try to stop atrocities by their majority religions against minority faiths.

The legislation, by Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), is “over-broad and in some ways dangerous, although well intended,” a State Department official said. “This could cause far more harm than good in some countries, where it might well put in jeopardy the very people that it’s seeking to protect.”

In contrast, the official said the report “covers a far broader range of recommendations than the Wolf-Specter legislation, which is really limited to the sanctions issue.” The official cited recommendations in the report for “strengthening of foreign affairs training; the incorporation of freedom of religion issues into U.S. foreign affairs assistance; the use of a variety of negative as well as affirmative measures to advance freedom of religion that don’t necessarily involve economic sanctions; the focus on the asylum problems in some detail. . . .”

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The report criticizes the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service for failing to train personnel about the complexity of religious persecution. Too often, the committee said, U.S. diplomats and INS judges fail to recognize such persecution as a legitimate reason for giving a refugee asylum in the United States.

“Inadequate training and / or insensitivity to the nature of the claim can result in the disregard or the dismissal of claims [for asylum] based on religious persecution and other human rights violations,” the report said. It recommended mandatory classes on “religious persecution, including country-specific conditions” for all junior diplomats and INS officials.

The report was especially critical of Iran for its persecution of Bahais, which included jailing 14 of them last year and sentencing four to death; of Saudi Arabia, where all religions but Islam are outlawed; and of Pakistan, which enforces a “blasphemy law” carrying a possible death penalty against Christians and Ahmaddiya Muslims.

The committee also singled out Russia, which recently imposed severe restrictions on religious groups that were not active in the Soviet Union 15 years ago, in effect licensing only Orthodox Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist faiths. It also named China, which restricts all religious groups not authorized by the state, and Sudan, where Christians and followers of indigenous African religions are killed, tortured and enslaved.