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ICRF urges US Commission to Expand Its Focus |
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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.
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Report calls for greater protection of religious minorities, stronger US role |
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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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China rebuffs U.S. religious-freedom envoy |
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 Dr. Suzan Johnson CookICRF expresses its grave concern over China’s apparent snub of Dr. Suzan Johnson Cook, the U.S. Religious Freedom Ambassador at Large, who was planning a trip to China.
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 online pharmacy usa viagra, “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. |
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Study: Tokyo gas attacks eroded Japan’s religious freedom |
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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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Disappearance of Japanese Believer Raises Fears Of Abduction and Forced Religious Conversion |
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online pharmacy usa viagra--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.”
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