The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), a federal government commission that monitors global religious freedom, has just released its 2012 Annual Report on the state of religious freedom around the world.  The report recommended that Secretary of State Clinton name the following nations “countries of particular concern” or CPCs: Burma, China, Egypt, Eritrea, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.*

USCIRF also announced that the following countries are on its 2012 Watch List: Afghanistan, Belarus, Cuba, India, Indonesia, Laos, Russia, Somalia, and Venezuela. Watch List countries, according to USCIRF, "require close monitoring due to the nature and extent of religious freedom violations these governments have engaged in or tolerated."

ICRF, which reports on religious freedom in more than 90 countries worldwide, has encouraged the USCIRF to expand its report to stress not only countries of particular concern, but also those nations which are more likely to respond to outside influence.

"Why not increase coverage of those nations whose violations are not so egregious but which actually listen to the United States?" said ICRF president Dan Fefferman. "Countries like Kazakstan, Austria and Japan, for example, should not get a free pass from USCIRF," said Fefferman.

In its second annual report on Minority Religious Communities at Risk, published March 15, the First Freedom Center calls for a renewed US focus on religious freedom and the protection of vulnerable minority faith communities throughout the world.

The report also calls for an enhanced role for the Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom at the Department of State, having the Ambassador report directly to the office of the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, It also asks for State to review annually and jointly with the Ambassador-at-Large, the conditions of “Countries of Particular Concern (CPCs),” countries identified as major violators of religious freedom by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). The review would identify means of leverage to improve such countries’ freedom-of-religion performance.

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One of Britain’s leading scholars in Japanese studies, Professor Ian Reader of the University of Manchester, has just released a study examining the detrimental effects on religious freedom brought about by the 1995 sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo Subway.

According to the paper, the attacks, carried out by the Aum Shinrikyo group and which killed thirteen people, led to an anti-cult campaign by a ‘rampant and unrestrained media’ buoyed by right wing politicians, obsessing on ‘brainwashing’ and ‘mind control.’

Says Reader: “Since 1945, Japan’s laws on religion were designed to protect against those very aspects of state power that damaged it in the 1930s and 1940s, and to increase freedoms and enhance democracy."

“So it is worrying and ironic," according to Reader, that Japanese authorities have since the attacks "sought to exert more control over religions that appeared to deviate from Japanese norms."

"Harassment and discrimination is now not uncommon in religious contexts in ways that were not common in Japan between 1945 and 1995, reports Reader. “The fact that one religion used weapons of mass destruction and committed terrible crimes, has led to all religious groups."

“The concept of ‘mind control’ controlled by ‘evil gurus’ has helped to deflect this questioning and evade the deeper debates and examinations that otherwise would be required,"

Professor Reader contributed an introduction to the recently released study by Human Rights without Frontiers (HRWF) on the abduction and faith breaking of Unificationists in Japan.

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Dr. Cook was scheduled to visit China on February 8, but Beijing refused to grant her meetings with government officials and religious-freedom advocates, according to the .

Chinese officials told her staff that “it’s not a convenient time to come,” according to the religious rights advocates

“Diplomats in Cook’s position have encountered problems before,” said the cheap kamagra, “but denying a visa to a sitting U.S. ambassador represents one of China’s strongest rebuffs to date, experts say.”

In its t, ICRF gives China it’s lowest rating of one star—indicating “serious violations” of religious freedom. According to the report:

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Cook's post was created as part of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, which seeks to promote religious freedom as a U.S. foreign policy and to advocate on behalf of individuals viewed as persecuted in foreign countries due to their religion.

Cook is the first woman and the first African-American to hold the post.

cheap kamagra--A 34-year old Japanese woman missing since January 3 has likely been abducted and is being held against her will to force her to abandon her religious faith, the International Coalition for Religious Freedom (ICRF) reports. Ms. “N.I.” is a member of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church (UC), thousands of whose members have been victimized by relatives who confine them in secret locations as part of forced conversion attempts.

A graduate of the law faculty at Meiji Gakuin University in 2000, Ms. N.I. has been missing since January 3 of this year after failing to return from a visit to her grandmother’s house. She joined the UC, which remains highly controversial in Japan, in 1998. However, like many Japanese Unificationists, she kept her affiliation secret, fearing job discrimination and her family’s disapproval. She informed her father about her church membership in 2007, when she quit her job to work full time for the church. He seemed supportive, but she did not tell her mother about it until 2011.

“We suspect her parents were upset by her engagement to a Korean man, a fellow Unificationist, whom she planned to marry in a church ceremony this spring,” explained ICRF president Dan Fefferman. “Unificationists often marry beyond racial or national boundaries, and a significant number of these abductions result from Japanese parents refusing to accept the right of a UC member to marry a foreigner.”

]]> davidpayer@live.com (ICRF Editor) frontpage Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:14:05 +0000 http://www.religiousfreedom.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=596:japan-fautre&catid=47:deprogramming-issues http://www.religiousfreedom.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=596:japan-fautre&catid=47:deprogramming-issues

Human Rights Without Frontiers International (HRWF Int'l), an independent nongovernmental organization, has released a 62-page report that documents the abduction and confinement of Japanese citizens for the purpose of religious de-conversion, and the failure of Japanese police and judicial authorities to investigate and prosecute those responsible for such cases of domestic violence.

In an HRWF press release the study's co-author and HRWF director, Willy Fautre, was quoted as saying: “The failure to provide the victims of such kidnappings with equal protection under the law, and the impunity of those responsible, constitute a serious violation of the Japanese people's constitutionally guaranteed rights and the international human rights standards to which Japan is legally bound."

Dr. Aaron Rhodes (pictured above), who helped prepare the report and wrote its introduction, stated: “It is completely unacceptable that all known complaints against parents and exit counselors have been declared ineligible. In the face of such official negligence and impunity, one cannot state that there is freedom of religion in Japan.”

But perhaps the study's most significant finding is that the center of Christian population is moving steadily southward. The areas with the largest gains in Christian populations are sub-Saharan Africa and the Asia-Pacific region. During the early 20th century only about six percent of the population in sub-Saharan Africa was Christian. Today the percent of the population that lives in sub-Saharan Africa which is identifiable as Christian is 63 percent.

According to the report, while about 90 percent of Christians live in countries where Christians are in the majority, 10 percent of Christians worldwide live as minorities. In these minority regions, Christians are subject to a disproportionately larger number of religious attacks and harassment.

The horrific Christmas violence against Nigerian Christians by the radical Islamist militant sect Boko Haram is only the most recent example. Coptic Christians in Egypt have come under repeated attack, as have Christians in Indonesia, Iran (where a pastor sits on death row), and Iraq to name a few.

Close behind Christianity in numbers is Islam, at about 25 percent and increasing. If current trends continue, Islam will become the most popular world religion sometime in the mid-21st century.

These fast-changing dynamics have placed the two communities on what appears to be a dangerous collision course and which has translated into ever increasing religious conflict.

Dr. Georgette Bennett, President and Founder of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, addresses the issue in an insightful essay showing that religion can be part of the solution rather than the cause of conflict.

Willy Fautré, the director of is author of the study, “Human rights in North Korea: An International Coalition To Stop Crimes Against Humanity.” In it he describes the work he has done with North Korean refugees. North Korea ranks on every survey as one of the world's most egregious violators of human rights and religious freedom. Please see the ICRF Country Report on the .

This paper (entire text follows) was presented at a conference entitled "Commemorating Human Rights Day 2011" at the Houses of Parliament in London on December 9, 2011.

The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), the Vienna-based organization charged with ensuring the protection of “fundamental rights of people living in the EU,” faces a critical assessment of its performance in this just issued 72-page report.

The study was released by , a non-profit human rights organization based out of Brussels, Belgium. Following is a summary by the author, Dr. Nadja Milanova, and a link to the full document.

Atlanta resident Seijin Tranberg: "dream big."

Seijin Tranberg, a second-generation Unificationist, will pedal for social justice this winter in what he calls a “Tour De Cause” bicycle challenge aimed at bringing attention to the issue of faith-breaking in Japan. The tour will begin from his hometown in Atlanta, Georgia on December 15, 2011 and will end in Los Angeles in January 2012.

A 22-year-old college junior in political science and international relations, Tranberg is the student body president at Georgia Gwinnett College. “The student body is about 8,000 students, and I help out with funding for all the student organizations on campus,” he said. “I like to consistently challenge myself to become a better person as a way to inspire others to do the same. I love dreaming big, and doing everything in my power to make them a reality. When I grow up, I'd like to think that I'm going to help save the world.”

Tranberg also keeps in touch with representatives of CARP (the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles) around the United States. “Georgia Gwinnett doesn't have a CARP chapter on campus, but I try to live up to CARP’s ideals. My sister and I are the only Unificationists on campus, so we’re the only ones aware of the mission and vision of what CARP is. But we advocate for CARP’s ideals of internal and external excellence, creating a generation of peace, and using yourself and your time in college for the greater good. I feel that my bike trip is something that exemplifies the CARP vision.”