USA to release annual report on global religious freedom

These incidents were only among the worst atrocities catalogued by the State Department in this year’s worldwide Religious Freedom Report.

“The Administration has taken the position that ‘promoting and protecting religious freedom is a key objective of USA foreign policy, ‘” the senator wrote in an open letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, “yet the Ambassador-at-Large for religious freedom is buried in layers of bureaucracy rather than reporting directly to you like the Ambassadors-at-Large for the Office of Global Women’s Issues and the Office of Global AIDS Coordinator”.

“Some government bodies are tasked with encouraging religious harmony and protecting the rights of minority religious groups, but none enjoy the power or influence of those that regulate Islamic religious affairs”, said the report.

“In a few instances, native police failed to reply successfully to communal violence, together with assaults towards spiritual minorities, though native officers used broad authorities to deploy police and safety forces to regulate outbreaks of religiously motivated violence”.

“Although authorities permitted a few traditional religious ceremonies and practices” in Tibetan areas, authorities also often “restricted or canceled religious festivals, [and] at times forbade monks from traveling to villages to conduct religious ceremonies”, the report said. “After her remarks stirred several days of heated national condemnation and disrupted proceedings of parliament, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in parliament that he “strongly disapproved of the remarks” and “we should avoid using such language”.

The Nanavati-Mehta Commission on the 2002 riots finally launched its Final Report on November 18, however a few NGOs referred to as into query the impartiality of the findings. A few NGOs called into question the impartiality of the findings. “We need to redouble our efforts to serve as a beacon for religious freedom around the world and press countries to implement policies that protect religious expression and worship”. But the State Department’s comprehensive report places this development in a helpful, if horrifying, context.

“The actions of Islamic authorities, however, increasingly affected non-Muslims”, it said. They also resorted to kidnapping and rapping on the basis of their faith.

However, it said due to the country’s inaccessibility and lack of timely information, arrests and punishments are hard to verify.