Commission IDs Russia, others as religious persecutors

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) called on the Trump administration today to clearly communicate that religious freedom is a top foreign policy priority as state and non state-actors increasingly persecute religious minorities on a global scale.

In its annual report, the commission for the first time asked the State Department to identify Russia as a “country of particular concern” and to create a new designation for terror groups.

“The state of affairs for international religious freedom is worsening in both depth and breadth of violations,” the report said. “The blatant assaults have become so frightening … that less egregious abuses go unnoticed or at least unappreciated.”

The report, which covers 2016 to February 2017, is the 18th since the commission’s creation in 1998. It details religious freedom violations in 37 countries and makes country- and group-specific recommendations on how the United States can respond. The State Department last year designated 10 nations as countries of particular concern following the commission’s report. This year’s report recommends five additional countries, including Russia.

Russia, a majority Orthodox Christian nation, sees any independent religious activity as a threat to the country’s political and social stability, the commission said. The country has maintained a 1997 extremism law, under which it banned Jehovah’s Witnesses from the country last week.

“Exactly right,” Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, posted on Twitter. “Let’s work and pray for full religious freedom for the Russian people.”

The commission moved Egypt and Iraq from countries of concern to a tier-two list, which includes 10 other nations. Egypt has witnessed attacks against Coptic Christians with a December bomb blast at a Coptic church and two similar attacks on Palm Sunday this month. But Egyptian courts made some progress in bringing perpetrators of past attacks to justice, the report said. The report also ranked Bahrain under tier two for the first time and said human rights conditions for the majority Shia Muslims had deteriorated. The small Middle Eastern country witnessed a surge in unsubstantiated charges and interrogations of Shia clerics, the report said.

For the first time, the commission listed Islamic State (ISIS), the Afghanistan-based Taliban, and the Somali terror group al-Shabaab as “entities of particular concern.” The designations follow a December 2016 amendment to the International Religious Freedom Act that mandated the U.S. identify non-state entities that severely violated religious freedom.

“In order to help protect and preserve this right for all, our American government should do more, and as a first step, nominate and confirm an ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom,” Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla, said in a statement following the report’s release. The commission also urged the Trump administration to confirm a new ambassador-at-large. David Saperstein, who assumed the position in January 2015, completed his tenure this year. The Bush and Obama administrations did not fill the position until 16 and 28 months into their terms, respectively.