The U.S. State Department removed the sections covering religious freedom from the Country Reports on Human Rights that it released on May 24, three months past the statutory deadline Congress set for the release of these reports.
The new human rights reports–purged of the sections that discuss the status of religious freedom in each of the countries covered–are also the human rights reports that include the period that covered the Arab Spring and its aftermath.
Thus, the reports do not provide in-depth coverage of what has happened to Christians and other religious minorities in predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East that saw the rise of revolutionary movements in 2011 in which Islamist forces played an instrumental role.
For the first time ever, the State Department simply eliminated the section of religious freedom in its reports covering 2011 and instead referred the public to the 2010 International Religious Freedom Report – a full two years behind the times – or to the annual report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which was released last September and covers events in 2010 but not 2011.The U.S. State Department removed the sections covering religious freedom from the Country Reports on Human Rights that it released on May 24, three months past the statutory deadline Congress set for the release of these reports.
Makes sense, otherwise they would have had to add the United States to the list.
(Hat tip: Creative Minority Report)
7 comments
might want to check your formatting
paragraphs 2, 3 and 4 are posted twice
not that I have alot of room to complain…
so, a million Christians working in Saudi (many Filipino or from Kerala India) who are forbidden to attend church in that country, and who can be arrested and deported if they are caught attending a service don’t count as a human rights problem?
Figures.
>don’t count as a human rights problem?
They go to a theocratic dictatorship Muslim state and are surprised that they don’t have rights?
While it certainly is a human rights issue it begs the question why they would go? Guess making money is more important to them than their religion.
While not excusing the delay in publication, this will actually mean our diplomats can spend more time trying to influence religious freedom rather than write reports about it. From experience, the religious freedom section of the human rights report asks the same things as the international religious freedom (IRF) report, but with formatting and linguistic requirements that are different enough so you can’t just use one for the other. Also, at about the time you’re finishing the human rights report, you get hit for an update to the IRF, just to check if there have been any changes before they publish it. In essence, this is a way to streamline reporting so we can get out there and actually do diplomacy. It’s a never ending cycle of updating two reports that say the same thing differently so you don’t have the time to influence the situation for the better.
And yes, I speak from experience.
Salvage, you do realize that many of these Muslim states have (or had) a very large number of Christians in them already right?
Not very large, minorities and yes I was aware.
Ironically the one nation where they were given equality was Iraq, in fact Saddam appointed Christians to all levels of his government.
Then American invaded with Freedom Bombs and now Christians there are in as much danger as they are in the rest of the Middle East (except Israel).
They were born there so they don’t have much of a choice but migrant workers do and if they want to pray to their god safely then they should avoid places where that’s a problem.
JLC is correct. There has been no loss of reporting here. This is simply an effort to reduce duplication of work and free diplomats from unnecessarily burdensome reporting requirements. The entire treatment of the subject in this post is powerfully misleading.