WASHINGTON (BP)–The country’s immigration judges recently received a briefing on global religious persecution from Southern Baptist church-state specialist Richard Land and other representatives of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
USCIRF Chairman Michael Young and acting executive director Tad Stahnke joined Land in providing a review of the types of persecution in other countries at the immigration judges’ conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Land, a USCIRF member since September, is president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.
“It was an extremely important opportunity to help the judges, who are on the front line of this issue in terms of hearing religious refugee cases every day, get a better picture of the various kinds of persecution that take place in different countries and to make them more aware of the resources that are available to help them fairly adjudicate in these often life-and-death cases,” Land told Baptist Press. “The judges’ enthusiastic reception and active and involved question-and-answer sessions were most gratifying to the commission representatives who attended the conference.”
Land, Young and Stahnke shared responsibilities in describing the plight of persecuted religious adherents in four contexts:
— Persecution by authoritarian regimes.
— Government persecution for deviations from favored religions.
— Persecution by non-governmental groups.
— Persecution targeting women.
In the first three cases, the USCIRF representatives focused on a country that is an example of such persecution. Their presentation was “victim-oriented, since the relevant cases you hear all involve an alleged or potential victim of religious persecution,” Land and the others told the judges.
Information for this article was provided by a talking-points document given by Land to BP. All three USCIRF representatives delivered the same remarks at different times during the five workshops they conducted June 3-5.
The more violent examples of religious liberty violations are “detention, interrogation, impostition of an onerous financial penalty, forced labor, forced mass resettlement, imprisonment, forced religious conversion, beating, torture, mutilation, rape, enslavement, murder and execution,” Land and the others told the judges.
The USCIRF reps focused on China as the prime example of an authoritarian regime that persecutes its people. The communist giant also “gives rise to the largest number of asylum cases,” Land and the others said.
Chinese officials persecute those groups that refuse to register with the government or that are denied registration, especially Tibetan Buddhists, Uighur Muslims, Falun Gong adherents, non-registered Protestant Christians and the Vatican-affiliated Roman Catholic Church, they said.
Land and his colleagues also cited North Korea, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam as practicing such persecution.
In the second category, “the state serves religion, unlike authoritative regimes where religion serves the state,” they told the judges. This category is modeled sometimes in countries in which Shariah, the Islamic legal code, is enacted as the law of the land, the USCIRF representatives said. Pakistan is a primary example of such conditions. Others are Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Iran, they said.
Persecution is carried out by non-govennmental groups in countries in which the government “may be complicit in the private persecution, may choose not to protect the victims or punish the perpetrators or may be unable to do so,” the USCIRF officials told the judges. They gave details on Indonesia, India and Pakistan as major examples of this pattern of persecution. Other examples are Egypt, Nigeria and Sulawesi, they said.
Persecution of women includes religious slavery of girls, murder for accusations of witchcraft and female genital mutilation, Land, Young and Stahnke told the judges. It also includes honor killing by family members, a practice that includes religious and cultural factors and is found primarily in the Mideast but also in parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The law establishing the USCIRF in 1998 also blocked from admission to the United States foreign government officials who have participated in especially severe violations of religious liberty during the previous two years. “Although the State Department has found that several governments have engaged in particularly severe violations of religious freedom, no list appears to exist of officials who have engaged in such violations,” the USCIRF representatives said.
The briefing by Land, Young and Stahnke marked the first time the USCIRF had been invited to conduct such workshops at the immigration judges’ yearly conference. Nearly all of the United States’ 220 immigration judges attended the conference.
The USCIRF is responsible for researching religious liberty issues overseas and making policy recommendations to the White House and Congress. It consists of nine members appointed by the president and congressional leaders. President Bush selected Land.
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