WASHINGTON (CNS): The latest annual Report on International Religious Freedom by the State Department of the United States (US) designated China a “country of particular concern”—a distinction it has held since 1999.
The report follows the signing of an executive order on June 2 by the president, Donald Trump prioritising US support for religious freedom in diplomacy worldwide.
The section on China was the largest in the report. It cited widespread discrimination of Uighur Muslims as a cause for particular concern.
The report said the Chinese government continued to justify restrictions on religious practices of Muslims in Xinjiang because of what it called the “three evils” of “ethnic separatism, religious extremism and violent terrorism.”
The Chinese government recognises five official religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Protestantism and Catholicism. Members of each of these religious groups must register before they can participate in religious services. Many faith practitioners have reported they are subject to surveillance and persecution, however.
More than a million Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs, Hui and members of other Muslim groups as well as Uighur Christians have been held in internment camps in Xinjiang, the report said. Those being held have been subjected to “forced disappearance, political indoctrination, torture, physical and psychological abuse, including forced sterilisation and sexual abuse, forced labour, and prolonged detention without trial because of their religion and ethnicity,” it said.
Sam Brownback, ambassador-at-large for religious freedom, told reporters during a news conference on June 10 that the US Department of State had no evidence that Muslim Uighurs had been released from prison or detention and that workers had been placed into forced labour.
US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, told reporters that “China continues its decades-long war on faith,” citing the detention of Uighurs as well as the repression of Tibetans and Buddhists, Falun Gong and Christians.
“The Chinese Communist Party is now ordering religious organisations to obey CCP leadership and infuse communist dogma into their teachings and practice of their faith,” he said.
The report said religious groups without official government recognition “reported various forms of government harassment” including assaults, arrests, prosecutions, surveillance, travel restrictions and property seizure or destruction as well as denials of requests for registration or no response to such requests.
The report also identified other countries for infringements of religious freedom.
In Nigeria, terrorist groups, including Boko Haram and Islamic State-West Africa “attacked population centres and religious targets and maintained a growing ability to stage forces in rural areas and launch attacks against civilian and military targets across the North East, according to observers.”
The report repeated earlier findings that in Vietnam “members of religious groups said some local and provincial authorities used the local and national regulatory systems to slow, delegitimise, and suppress religious activities of groups that resisted close government management of their leadership, training programs, assemblies, and other activities.”
In India, increased reports of violence against religious and ethnic minorities and critics of the government and the government’s inability to prevent such incidents were cited in the report.
“Some officials of Hindu-majority parties, including from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), made inflammatory public remarks or social media posts against minority communities,” the report noted.
Brownback also noted that Saudi Arabia is the only country to prohibit all churches. Since 2004, Saudi Arabia has been designated a “country of particular concern” under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 “for having engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom.”
The report did highlight positive developments in the case of Gambia which hauled Myanmar before the International Court of Justice to answer for genocide against its Rohingya ethnic group; Uzbekistan boosted religious freedom and ended police raids on unregistered religious groups; the United Arab Emirates became the first Middle East country to allow the construction of a Mormon temple.
The report also credited the Democratic Republic of the Congo for improving relations between the government and religious communities since the inauguration of its president, Felix Tshisekedi, in January 2019, based on media reports and statements from religious leaders.
The report is based on the findings of individual US embassies in each nation. Diplomats gather information from government officials, religious groups, nongovernmental organisations, journalists, human rights monitors, academics, media and others, said the report’s introduction.
The State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom also collects and analyses additional information from separate sources.
