November 10, 2005

By Paul Eckert/Washington Post

The United States has named eight countries as the world’s worst violators of religious liberty.

Asian communist states China, North Korea and Vietnam, as well as military-run Burma, were described in an annual State Department report to Congress as serious violators of religious freedom. China and its neighbours joined Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Eritrea as nations designated as “countries of particular concern”, the State Department said.

“These are countries where governments have engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom over the past year,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters as she unveiled the report, covering 197 countries.

She said Vietnam, which remained on the list of worst violators, had made progress in 2005, including signing a pact with Washington over how it would improve religious rights.

“If Vietnam’s record of improvement continues, it would enable us to eventually remove Vietnam from our list of countries of particular concern,” Dr Rice said.

The US envoy for international religious freedom, John Hanford, said Hanoi had made some “very significant efforts to improve religious freedom”, including passing new laws, releasing 14 prisoners and opening some closed churches.

The report placed China, North Korea and Burma on a list of authoritarian states that “regard some or all religious groups as enemies of the state because of their religious beliefs or their independence from central authority”. In China, which restricts worship to state-sanctioned groups, “religious leaders and adherents, including those in official churches, were detained, arrested or sentenced to prison or re-education through labour camps”.

The report said Beijing had placed under heavy scrutiny and sometimes harassed underground Christian groups, Muslims of the Uighur ethnic minority, Tibetan Buddhists and members of Falun Gong, a meditation sect. Falun Gong has doggedly criticised China since Beijing banned it in 1999.

“While the Falun Gong are not officially a religion, more a spiritual movement, the suffering that they’ve endured is unspeakable,” Mr Hanford said.

“There have been so many who have been arrested, thousands and thousands, many who have died in police custody.”

Dr Rice denied there had been any wavering in the US commitment to global human rights, despite disclosures of secret prisons run by the CIA in Eastern Europe.

She came under sharp questioning from reporters about the Bush Administration’s policies on treatment of suspected terrorists detained in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

REUTERS, WASHINGTON POST

http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/washington-names-worst-religious-free dom-violators/2005/11/09/1131407700709.html?oneclick=true