Unprecedented meeting on religious freedom

NEW YORK–As hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East and Africa pressed into Europe, parliamentarians flew to New York from all over the world for an unprecedented gathering to address rising threats to religious freedom.

International religious freedom meetings typically draw a handful of niche enthusiasts; the unusual international interest this time, especially from European lawmakers, centered on threats from ISIS.

On Friday, the international lawmakers packed a room at the One UN Hotel across from the United Nations. Organizers from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) thought they could get a group of 30 or 40 parliamentarians, but they filled every seat with 130 attendees and had to turn away another 30.

“It’s an idea for which the time is right,” said Aykan Erdemir, a Turkish academic and a member of the Turkish parliament until recently.

Lawmakers came from Tunisia, the United Kingdom, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, Senegal, Malaysia, and Turkey, among many others, as the UN was kicking off its General Assembly. They wanted information about what they could do on the issue—navigating local governments, civil society, and institutions like the UN.

On Saturday morning, the parliamentarians gathered to sign the New York Resolution, a measure pledging, among other matters, to “advocate for individuals suffering from persecution.”

“Violent extremists are very outspoken and transnational in propagating hate,” Erdemir said. “People advocating rights and pluralism should be as outspoken and organized and transnational as the extremists.”

The roomful brought strange meetings. An Iranian ayatollah, Seyed Mostafa Mohaghegh Damad, spoke, as well as Naghmeh Abedini, an American whose husband is imprisoned in Iran for his Christian faith. Abedini said she spoke with the ayatollah about the plight of her husband. Assiya Nasir, one of the only Christians in Pakistan’s National Assembly, also spoke.

Germans in particular had a high profile at the gathering, matching their government’s role as a leader in taking in hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East. A German foundation, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, provided significant funding to bring the parliamentarians together. Volker Kauder, one of the leaders of the German parliament, opened the meeting speaking about the plight of religious freedom in the Middle East. He urged the UN to address the matter at the General Assembly.

“The history of Europe shows that we have all been refugees,” said Peter van Dalen, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, who also heads up the parliament’s Intergroup on Religious Freedom. Van Dalen mentioned that his family fled persecution of Huguenots in France and settled in the Netherlands.

This group, dubbed the International Panel of Parliamentarians for Freedom of Religion or Belief (IPPFoRB), plans to host another gathering in Berlin next year. One European joked that IPPFoRB sounds like a group the European Union came up with.

Lawmaker after lawmaker extolled Germany’s leadership on religious freedom.

“I applaud the moral courage Germany is showing,” said Abid Raja, a member of the Norwegian parliament. “We need to do more. We need to stop the reasons behind why people are leaving their countries.” Norway is not a member of the EU, but agreed to double its refugee intake this year to 2,000 and accept 3,000 refugees each year for the next two years.

The United Nations’ point person on religious freedom, Heiner Bielefeldt, is also German. His unpaid position shows the resources religious freedom typically receives: He has one full-time staffer. Several speakers on Friday called for the UN to give him more resources.

Privately, U.S. advocates praised Germany too.

“As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, I feel so happy to see the way Germany is stepping up on so many fronts,” said Katrina Lantos Swett, a longtime human rights advocate and now a commissioner on the USCIRF. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has “set a tone,” she said.

The United States had a role in organizing the gathering and was represented by State Department Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom David Saperstein and USCIRF Chair Robert George. Their close colleagues in the parallel Canadian Office of Religious Freedom also pulled together the event.

In an energetic speech, Saperstein urged the international lawmakers not to separate religious freedom from other issues, but to see it as foundational in every kind of policy. He encouraged them to hold hearings, to issue statements, and to attend trials for the persecuted. He mentioned that he and other officials attended the trial of two South Sudanese pastors recently, and that the pastors were acquitted of the most serious charges and released.

“Even a country as powerful as the United States cannot fight this battle alone,” George said during a coffee break. George said European leaders, especially Germany, have “shown themselves serious about religious freedom.” Now, he said, it’s a matter of seeing if the group can maintain this broad base of support for religious freedom, a coalition that has disappeared domestically.

Djermana Seta, president of the Commission for Freedom of Religion at the Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina, spoke about broader concepts at the event, but then revealed that she was a refugee in Europe as a teenager. She recalled coming to the border of Slovenia and Italy and seeing a poster that said, “Einstein was a refugee, too.”

“That gave me hope,” she said. She has since returned to Sarajevo to work on religious freedom.