USCIRF Releases 2022 Annual Report with Recommendations for U.S. Policy

 Recommends Afghanistan as Country of Particular Concern

Washington, D.C. – The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) today released its 2022 Annual Report documenting developments during 2021, including significant regress in countries such as Afghanistan and the Central African Republic (CAR). USCIRF’s 2022 Annual Report provides recommendations to enhance the U.S. government’s promotion of freedom of religion or belief abroad.   

The report also notes USCIRF recommendations implemented by the U.S. government—including the designation of Russia as a country of particular concern, the imposition of targeted sanctions on religious freedom violators, and genocide determinations for atrocities perpetrated by the Chinese government against Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims and by the Burmese military against Rohingya Muslims.

“We are disheartened by the deterioration of freedom of religion or belief in some countries— especially Afghanistan under the Taliban’s de facto government since August. Religious minorities have faced harassment, detention, and even death due to their faith or beliefs, and years of progress toward more equitable access to education and representation of women and girls have disappeared,” USCIRF Chair Nadine Maenza said. “Meanwhile, USCIRF is encouraged by the Biden administration’s continued prioritization of international religious freedom during its first year. To continue this progress, we strongly urge the administration to implement USCIRF’s recommendations—in particular, to expand its Priority 2 refugee designation to grant access for at-risk religious groups in Afghanistan, and to designate Nigeria as a country of particular concern.”

USCIRF’s independence and bipartisanship enables it to unflinchingly identify threats to religious freedom abroad. In its 2022 Annual Report, USCIRF recommends 15 countries to the State Department for designation as “countries of particular concern” (CPCs) because their governments engage in or tolerate “systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations.” These include 10 that the State Department designated as CPCs in November 2021: Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan—as well as five others: Afghanistan, India, Nigeria, Syria, and Vietnam. For the first time ever, the State Department designated Russia as a CPC in 2021, which USCIRF had been recommending since 2017. Regrettably, the State Department removed Nigeria as a CPC though it had been added the previous year and religious freedom conditions remain dire.

The 2022 Annual Report also recommends 12 countries for placement on the State Department’s Special Watch List (SWL) based on their governments’ perpetration or toleration of severe violations. These include three that the State Department placed on that list in November 2021: Algeria, Cuba, and Nicaragua—as well as nine others: Azerbaijan, CAR, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Turkey, and Uzbekistan. In 2021, USCIRF removed CAR from its SWL recommendations because incidents of religious targeting and violence had decreased during 2020, but these trends have since been reversed.

The 2022 Annual Report further recommends to the State Department seven non-state actors for redesignation as “entities of particular concern” (EPCs) for systematic, ongoing, egregious violations. The State Department designated all seven of these groups as EPCs in November 2021: al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, the Houthis, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP or ISIS-West Africa), and Jamaat Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM).

“Throughout the past year, the U.S. government continued to condemn abuses of religious freedom and hold perpetrators accountable through targeted sanctions and other tools at its disposal. Moving forward, the United States should take additional steps to support freedom of religion or belief around the world. USCIRF’s 2022 Annual Report makes recommendations on how Congress and the Executive Branch can further advance this universal, fundamental human right,” USCIRF Vice Chair Nury Turkel stated.

In addition to chapters with key findings and U.S. policy recommendations for these 27 countries, the annual report describes and assesses U.S. international religious freedom policy overall. The report also highlights important global developments and trends related to religious freedom during 2021—including in countries that do not meet the criteria for CPC or SWL recommendations. These include: the COVID-19 pandemic and religious freedom, blasphemy and hate speech law enforcement, transnational repression, religious intolerance in Europe, deteriorating religious freedom conditions in South Asia, and political upheaval that raises religious freedom concerns.

The report also includes sections highlighting key USCIRF recommendations that the U.S. government has implemented from USCIRF’s 2021 Annual Report, discussing human rights violations perpetrated based on the coercive enforcement of interpretations of religion, and providing details on individuals included in USCIRF’s Freedom or Religion or Belief (FoRB) Victims List and Religious Prisoners of Conscience Project.

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The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) is an independent, bipartisan federal government entity established by the U.S. Congress to monitor, analyze, and report on religious freedom abroad. USCIRF makes foreign policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State and Congress intended to deter religious persecution and promote freedom of religion and belief. To interview a Commissioner, please contact USCIRF at [email protected].

This op-ed was originally published by USA Today on April 16, 2022.

By USCIRF Commissioners Jim Carr and Fred Davie

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has long advocated for the religious freedom of individuals of diverse faiths­­ and beliefs across the globe, from Uyghur Muslims facing China’s campaign of genocide to Jews experiencing an alarming rise of antisemitism in Europe and nonbelievers facing challenges across Africa.

This Easter, we also highlight that Christians—millions of whom suffer at the hands of both state and non-state actors—are experiencing terrible threats and persecution across many countries. In the Middle East and North Africa, for example, the Algerian government has forcibly closed 13 Protestant churches and ordered the closure of 7 more, while nearly 20 years of conflict, instability, and genocidal terrorism have reduced Iraq’s indigenous Christian community from 1.4 million to less than 250,000.

Elsewhere, India has a growing patchwork of laws that violate religious freedom or enable its violation, amid a rising tide of religious intolerance emboldened by Hindu nationalism. A third of India’s 28 states maintain laws restricting religious conversion, which are used as a pretext to target Christians and enable violence against them. The government has also turned on Christian religious freedom advocates, such as Father Stan Swamy, an 84 year old Jesuit priest who spent his life helping India’s marginalized religious communities. He was arrested in late 2020 under a decades-old law against “unlawful activities” and detained in harsh conditions, where he contracted COVID-19 and died last July.

In Burma, a symbiotic relationship has steadily grown between the ruling military junta—the Tatmadaw—and Buddhist nationalists. Alongside its six-year genocidal campaign against the predominantly Muslim Rohingya minority, the Tatmadaw continues to rain violence down on the country's Christians. In 2021 alone, its rampage included raiding the Hakha Baptist Church in the capital of Chin State in February, murdering Pastor Chung Lian Ceu and three others in March, attacking a Catholic Church in Kayah State in May, and gunning down Baptist pastor Cung Biak Hum in September.

Central government failure, state government repression, and religiously-motivated violence by non-state actors have turned parts of Nigeria—Africa’s most populous country of approximately 211 million, including more than 100 million Christians—into a crucible of persecution. In September 2021, a violent mob in Kano State, emboldened by the state’s imposition of a strict interpretation of Shari’a law, killed a local pastor for allegedly helping a Muslim convert to Christianity. In October, gunmen opened fire on a church in Kaduna State during morning prayers, killing two worshippers. And radical Islamist groups Boko Haram and the Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP) continue to abduct, rape, and murder Christians; ISWAP for example, continued to enslave USCIRF Religious Prisoner of Conscience Leah Sharibu for refusing to convert to Islam.

The statistics behind these country-level dynamics are deeply disturbing. According to Open Doors’ latest World Watch List, in 2021 over 360 million Christians lived in places where they experienced “high levels of persecution and discrimination” while 5,898 Christians died for their faith; 6,175 were detained, arrested, sentenced, or imprisoned; and 3,829 were abducted. The sheer scale of this repression can appear quite daunting—and yet we can, as a nation, make a difference. For example, many individuals have fled religious repression and persecution in their home countries. The United States can and should provide refuge, through asylum and refugee resettlement processes, to those most vulnerable families and individuals, and in doing so serve as a role model to the world in support of freedom of religion or belief.

C.S. Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed, “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.” Many Christians today, in fact, are facing this very reality. And for those of us who have both the freedom and the means to speak out, we must do so to support and protect the lives and the fundamental right to religious freedom of followers of all faiths—or of none at all—including millions of Christians around the world.

USCIRF Calls for Permanent Release of Iranian Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani Following Furlough

Washington, D.C. – The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) today welcomed Iran’s temporary furlough of religious prisoner of conscience Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani and called on the government to permanently release him. Iranian security officials arrested Nadarkhani in July 2018 on charges of “acting against national security” and “promoting Zionist Christianity.”

“Pastor Nadarkhani’s furlough is a welcome development following years of detention and a serious illness in Evin Prison,” said USCIRF Chair Nadine Maenza, who advocates for Pastor Nadarkhani through USCIRF’s Religious Prisoners of Conscience Project. “We call on Iran to fully release Pastor Nadarkhani and all other individuals serving prison sentences on the basis of their religious beliefs.”

Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani was the leader of a 400-member house church in Iran. In 2010, an Iranian court sentenced him to death for apostasy—but he was acquitted in 2012. In 2017, Pastor Nadarkhani faced trial again on false charges of “acting against national security” and promoting “Zionist Christianity,” for which he was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. In July 2018, plainclothes agents raided Pastor Nadarkhani’s home to bring him to Evin Prison in Tehran, beating and apprehending him and using a taser gun on one of his sons. Both of Pastor Nadarkhani’s sons were denied educational advancement in September 2019, prompting Nadarkhani to undertake a three-week hunger strike in prison. His sentence was reduced to six years in June 2020. Nadarkhani reportedly fell ill in February 2021 following a suspected COVID-19 outbreak within Evin Prison. His current release date is July 2024.

In its 2021 Annual Report, USCIRF recommended that the U.S State Department designate Iran as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) for its ongoing, systematic, and egregious religious freedom violations. USCIRF published a country update highlighting Iran’s escalation of religious repression in 2021.

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The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) is an independent, bipartisan federal government entity established by the U.S. Congress to monitor, analyze, and report on religious freedom abroad. USCIRF makes foreign policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State, and Congress intended to deter religious persecution and promote freedom of religion and belief. To interview a Commissioner, please contact USCIRF at [email protected].