US report finds religious freedom under threat; IS, extremist groups leading

Local authorities also pressured religious believers to join state-controlled religious associations and used coercive measures, including confinement and abuse in detention centers, to punish members of unregistered groups, the State Department said.

Aside from the leading trends in the report, Kerry emphasized in his remarks that “the right to religious freedom is not contingent on having a large number of followers”.

It underlined that “Jewish citizens attended services at synagogues and lived in safety throughout the country”, adding that the government allows foreign Christian communities to attend worship services in approved places.

The report was released by US Secretary of State John Kerry.

“After years of growing religious tensions and violence in Sri Lanka generated by hardline ethnic Buddhist groups, a new government has taken office and staked out a much more tolerant view of religious diversity”.

The law provides for nondiscrimination in all spheres of civic, political, public, economic, and cultural life regardless of religious affiliation or belief, but does not provide specific punishments for offenses of this nature.

The Centre on Thursday rejected the United States government’s report on global Religious Freedom, which noted that India witnessed religiously motivated killings, arrests, coerced religious conversions, riots and actions restricting the right of individuals to change faith in 2014. Long vacancies in key positions, lack of resources and prioritization, and diminished standing within the State Department bureaucracy have hampered our ability to champion this fundamental freedom overseas.

“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.

Besides the crisis facing Christians at the hands of Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, it also discusses systematic persecution of Christians from China to Saudi Arabia to North Korea.

The report specifically accuses Central Asian governments of cracking down on “peaceful religious activities” under the guise of battling extremism.

The State Department said a few human rights NGOs and religious minority groups expressed concern over what they perceived as laws and government practises favouring Hinduism over other faiths, while a few Hindu groups expressed concern over laws and government practises that they perceived as favouring minority religious communities.

“Religious bigotry is present to a degree in every continent and every country, and sadly, even including our own”. Immedieatly Barack Obama’s speech strikes in our mind, Siri Fort speech made by the US President Barack Obama on the importance of religious freedom and tolerance when he was in New Delhi in the month of January.