Albright Creates High-Level Post To Help Ensure Religious Liberty

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced Friday that she is creating a high-level post in the State Department to ensure that concerns about religious liberty around the world are addressed in all aspects of U.S. foreign policy.

The step was recommended by the Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad and Albright endorsed it only minutes after receiving the panel’s report.

“I am taking immediate action on the report’s first and most important recommendation,” she said at a news conference. “I will designate a new senior-level coordinator … to ensure that our efforts to advance religious freedom are integrated successfully into our broader foreign policy. … In this way, we can assure the American people and the committee that its best ideas will be brought to life, not studied to death.”

The 21-member committee - including Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Baha’i religious leaders and academic experts - made almost 100 other recommendations intended to focus U.S. government policy on religious persecution, potentially one of the hot-button issues of the post-Cold War world.

The committee said the administration should consider positive as well as negative inducements to promote religious freedom. For instance, the report said, countries that improve their record on religious tolerance could be promised foreign aid, trade preferences, diplomatic support and high-level visits by U.S. leaders. Countries that continue persecution could be threatened with economic sanctions.

But the committee said it was not yet ready to recommend a broad policy on sanctions because it said it had not yet fully studied the complex issue. The panel promised more thorough treatment of the subject in its next report late this year.

The report criticizes the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service for failing to train personnel in the complexity of religious persecution. Too often, the committee said, U.S. diplomats and INS judges fail to recognize such persecution as a legitimate reason for giving a refugee asylum in the United States.

It was especially critical of Iran for its persecution of Baha’is, including ailing 14 of them last year and sentencing four to death; of Saudi Arabia where all religions but Islam are outlawed; and of Pakistan, which enforces a “blasphemy law,” carrying a possible death penalty, against Christians and Ahmaddiya Muslims.

The committee also singled out Russia, which recently enacted a law imposing severe restrictions on religious groups that were not active in the Soviet Union 15 years ago, in effect licensing only Orthodox Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist faiths; of China which restricts all religious groups that are not authorized by the state; and of Sudan, where Christians and followers of indigenous African religions are murdered, tortured and enslaved.