Aug 30, 2016
FOR YOUR INFORMATION
August 30, 2016 | Daniel I. Mark and Sandra Jolley
The following op/ed appeared in Religion News Service on August 30, 2016
(RNS) Gedhun Choekyi Nyima was a 6-year-old boy when he disappeared from his home in Tibet in 1995. China’s government was the culprit, abducting him three days after the Dalai Lama had proclaimed him the 11th incarnation of the Panchen Lama. Twenty-one years after this unconscionable action, he remains disappeared, with Beijing claiming he is in its custody.
Countless individuals endure a similar fate across the globe, typically at the hands of governments that repress human rights.
Tuesday (Aug. 30) — the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances — we will mark their plight. Declared by the U.N. General Assembly in 2010, this day stands as an indictment of every nation that is responsible for disappearances.
As the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, on which we serve, has documented, many have been disappeared for reasons relating to religion.
The Panchen Lama is but one example from China. Among others are Catholic priests who refused to submit to China’s registration rules designed to control religious practice, and human rights lawyers like Gao Zhisheng who advocate for people of faith. Now under strict surveillance, he initially disappeared in 2009. In July 2015, Beijing launched a sweeping dragnet against other religious freedom defenders and human rights advocates, with nearly 300 arrested, detained or disappeared.
Russia is another perpetrator of religious disappearances. In the Tatarstan region, Suleiman Zaripov, a leading Russian Tatar imam, was disappeared in early 2016. In the North Caucasus region, officials wage a grinding battle against insurgent and peaceful Muslims alike, imposing “collective justice” through disappearances, as well as detentions, torture and murder.
After annexing Crimea in 2014, Russian forces began to subject its people to Russia’s religious freedom restrictions, from onerous religious registration rules to its extremism law. As in Russia, Muslims were disproportionately targeted, with the practice of Islam often conflated with extremism. In 2014, a number of Crimean Tatars were disappeared, including Islyam Dzhepparov and Dzhevdet Islayamov.
In Uzbekistan, the same government that holds an estimated 12,000 mostly nonviolent Muslim religious prisoners also is responsible for disappearing Muslim leaders such as Abduvali Mirzaev and his elder son, Obid Nazarov. In January 2016, the Uzbek government announced the death in prison of Akram Uldashev, a religious leader whose writings inspired an independent Muslim business movement.
Authorities had imprisoned him since 1999 for alleged involvement in a deadly bombing in Tashkent, a charge that human rights groups roundly dismissed as bogus. Uldashev’s family did not know his whereabouts within the Uzbek prison system since 2009.
Another country notorious for disappearances relating to religion is North Korea, which restricts every aspect of its citizens’ lives, including religious practice. Anyone discovered engaging in clandestine religious activity faces draconian penalties including disappearance, torture and public execution. Because North Korea is such a closed society, it is hard even to know the names of the disappeared.
What can we do about those who have been disappeared and the nations responsible for disappearing them?
The International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, which created USCIRF, holds some answers. IRFA calls upon the State Department to designate nations that perpetrate or tolerate severe religious freedom violations as CPCs, or “countries of particular concern.”
CPC designations mark these states as the world’s worst religious freedom abusers, which may make them eligible for sanctions and other consequences. Among the IRFA criteria for CPC designation is the habitual practice of “causing the disappearance of persons by [their] abduction or clandestine detention … ” Such a designation draws attention to those disappeared and the conditions that led to their incarceration.
The State Department rightly designates three of the four nations noted above — China, North Korea and Uzbekistan — as CPCs. As for Russia, its religious freedom situation is increasingly dire. If the violations in Russia reach the CPC standard of “systematic, egregious and ongoing,” then Russia, too, could earn a recommendation for CPC status.
Moreover, there are other nations that USCIRF recommends as CPCs, all of which are covered in our annual report, but that the State Department has not designated as such. Designating them as CPCs would be another important step.
Another meaningful action to take in support of the disappeared is to advocate vigorously on their behalf. One such effort that the U.S. House of Representatives undertakes is the Defending Freedoms Project.
Launched in December 2012 by the Tom Lantos Commission in conjunction with USCIRF and Amnesty International USA, the project works with members of Congress to advocate for the release of prisoners of conscience, including those who have been forcibly disappeared, and highlight the restrictive conditions that led to their imprisonment.
Equally important, beyond official action, people of conscience can and should take up the cause of the disappeared.
In the end, silence is the mortal enemy of the disappeared. Let us not be silent. Let us be a voice for the voiceless. Let us not rest until the disappeared are freed or accounted for and culpable governments are held responsible.
(Daniel Mark is a vice chair at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Sandra Jolley is a USCIRF commissioner.)
Aug 25, 2016
FOR YOUR INFORMATION
August 25, 2016 | Kristina Arriaga and Rev. Thomas J. Reese, S.J.
The following op/ed appeared in The Hill on August 25, 2016.
Many men, women, and children each year come to our borders seeking asylum. While many officials work faithfully under difficult conditions to protect our borders, asylum seekers all too often encounter skeptical, improperly trained, and poorly supervised officials who turn them away without proper screening.
The obvious risk is that the United States is sending back to their countries of origin victims of persecution and torture, with possible tragic consequences. And those temporarily admitted to pursue asylum cases are detained, often for many months, in prison-like facilities in isolated areas, far from legal counsel.
These conditions are unacceptable. While the U.S. government must protect our nation’s borders and enhance our security, it also has a duty to properly screen and treat with dignity those who are exercising their right to seek safe haven in the United States. Failing to protect such people will not make us safer, but will violate our country’s fundamental character and bedrock values.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), a bipartisan Commission on which we serve, issued a report, Barriers to Protection: The Treatment of Asylum Seekers in Expedited Removal. This report confirmed such problems in Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies including U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which includes Border Patrol (BP); U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).
Major problems were found in implementing Expedited Removal, a process by which non-citizens arriving without documents or with fraudulent ones can be returned summarily to their countries of origin without an immigration court hearing. The system includes safeguards because bona fide refugees often do not have documents or must use fraudulent ones to flee. The Expedited Removal law thus mandates ways to identify and allow refugees to seek asylum in immigration court once they establish a credible fear of persecution or torture.
This mandate has been violated repeatedly, as seen in ICE-run facilities in which asylum-seeking women and children are detained under conditions that courts have found do not comply with the U.S. government’s own standards for child detention as defined in a 1997 legal settlement, the Flores Agreement. Children in these settings have experienced anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and developmental regressions.
The conditions of the facilities housing adult asylum seekers also are concerning, with jail-like settings possibly triggering memories of past mistreatment, increasing the risk of re-traumatization or causing asylum seekers prematurely to terminate their asylum claims.
In addition, CBP’s initial processing interviews are riddled with problems, including lack of privacy, questionable interpretation practices, and failures to ask required questions, correctly record answers, or allow interviewees to review and correct errors. For example, investigators were told of a four-year-old whose file indicated he said he came to the United States to work, and met an El Salvadoran and a Nepali asylum seeker who each reported that, despite expressing a fear of return, the CBP officer recorded only identifying information. A Bangladeshi reported that he was turned away by the first U.S. officer he encountered at the border when he said he was seeking asylum. The officer told him to try Mexico.
There also remain problems with quality assurance and CBP’s implementation instructions to BP agents. Especially disturbing is CBP officers’ openly-expressed skepticism about asylum seekers’ claims. For example, a supervisor doubted Chinese Christian asylum seekers’ credibility because they could not name the church they attended. In fact, many worship in homes, not churches.
Clearly, the situation is troubling, but there are solutions that DHS can and should implement immediately to get its house in order. These measures are not glamorous but are vitally necessary, and range from reforming CBP’s training and interviewing practices and ICE’s housing of asylum seekers, to appointing a high-ranking official to coordinate refugee and asylum issues among the agencies involved in Expedited Removal and oversee reforms.
One hundred thirty years ago, a young Jewish woman penned a sonnet which is engraved on our Statue of Liberty, the “Mother of Exiles,” and which famously reads: “Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free./The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.”
While our great nation faces different challenges today, our character as Americans has not changed and should not change. How we treat those who come to our borders seeking freedom and safety says much about the kind of nation we are and will be.
*Kristina Arriaga is a Commissioner for the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). Rev. Thomas J. Reese, S.J. is USCIRF’s Chair.
Aug 12, 2016
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 12, 2016
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Religious freedom is under attack today in many nations around the world, harming individuals and threatening the stability of societies worldwide. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) welcomes the attention given to this vital right in the U.S. State Department’s latest International Religious Freedom (IRF) Report, released on August 10. Covering 2015, the report comprehensively documents religious freedom violations in almost 200 countries, features the cases of thousands imprisoned because of their religion or belief, and highlights non-state actors’ egregious abuses. USCIRF is pleased to see that this year’s report gives additional attention to the pernicious consequences of blasphemy laws.
“About 74% of the world’s population are living in countries with serious restrictions on religious freedom, according to David Saperstein, the Ambassador-at-Large for Religious Freedom. This large number reinforces the importance of religious freedom and the task we have before us,” said USCIRF Chair Thomas Reese, S.J. “We at USCIRF applaud the State Department for the excellent work that went into this report and its efforts to encourage countries around the world to adopt policies that respect this fundamental right. The U.S. government can help ensure positive change. Let’s not miss this opportunity to strengthen our commitments with effective actions.”
The International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 (IRFA) requires the State Department annually to issue an IRF Report and, based on that report, designate as “countries of particular concern” (CPCs) those governments that “engage in or tolerate” systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom and take action to encourage improvements in those countries. Earlier this year, the Department designated 10 nations as CPCs under IRFA: Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. USCIRF agrees with these designations, and recommends that the State Department:
- Designate as CPCs seven additional countries – Central African Republic, Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Syria, and Vietnam: Pakistan’s government, for example, clearly meets IRFA’s CPC standard, but has never been so designated. Religiously-discriminatory constitutional provisions and laws, such as the country’s blasphemy and anti-Ahmadiyya laws, result in prosecutions and imprisonments. Religious minority communities, including Shi’a and Ahmadiyya Muslims, Christians, and Hindus, experience chronic sectarian and religiously-motivated violence from both terrorist organizations and individuals. The government’s failure to adequately protect targets of such violence or prosecute perpetrators has created a deep-rooted climate of impunity.
- Follow up CPC designations with concrete actions. The State Department designated Tajikistan as a CPC for the first time in 2016, but issued a waiver on taking any action as a consequence of the designation. Waivers also are in place for Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. While permitted under IRFA, waivers leave little incentive for CPC-designated countries to make improvements; therefore, USCIRF has recommended that they should be limited to a set period of time and subject to review for renewal.
- While permitted under IRFA, because waivers provide little incentive for CPC-designated countries to make improvements, USCIRF has recommended that they should be limited to a set period of time and subject to review for renewal.
- Use all of IRFA’s tools: IRFA provides the Secretary of State with various options to promote religious freedom, including negotiating a binding agreement, a rarely-used tool. USCIRF has recommended that the United States seek to negotiate binding agreements with, for example, the governments of Burma and Vietnam – both countries with which U.S. relations are expanding. Burma has been designated as a CPC since 1999. After more than 50 years of a military-controlled government, the new Burmese government will have many priorities; it is essential for the U.S. consistently to reinforce the importance of religious freedom and human rights for all its citizens, including Rohingya Muslims and Christians. As for Vietnam, USCIRF urges the United States to designate it as a CPC, and actively take steps to support meaningful and lasting reforms, including with respect to the proposed religion law. A binding agreement would build on the two countries’ proven working relationship and an earlier binding agreement when Vietnam was designated as a CPC from 2004-06.
USCIRF also welcomes the increased attention this year’s IRF Report gives to violations non-state actors have committed, which pose some of the greatest threats to religious freedom in today’s world. Now Congress needs to do its part by expanding the CPC classification to allow for the naming of non-state actors perpetrating systematic, egregious, and ongoing violations.
For more information, including on countries noted here and other countries USCIRF has recommended to be designated as CPCs and Tier II nations, please see USCIRF’s 2016 Annual Report.
To interview a Commissioner, please contact USCIRF at [email protected] or 202-786-0615