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For Your Information

December 19, 2012 | By: Mary Ann Glendon and Azizah al-Hibri

The following commentary appeared in The National Interest on December 18, 2012.

When most people picture Western Europe, they envision well-established democracies where fundamental freedoms are vigorously protected. For the most part, this portrait is accurate. However, when it comes to religious freedom, the past year and decade have witnessed trends that challenge this image.

As 2012 draws to a close, a number of countries continue restricting religious practice and expression, from religious dress to fundamental life rituals such as circumcision. Such restrictions not only compromise internationally protected rights, they fuel an environment in which religious people and members of religious minorities in particular are sometimes made to feel like outsiders in their home countries.

These infringements are surprisingly widespread.

For example, France and Belgium bar students in state schools and government workers from wearing "conspicuous religious symbols,” forbidding the Islamic headscarf, the Sikh turban, large Christian crosses, and the Jewish yarmulke.

France and Belgium now ban people from publicly wearing full-face veils while Switzerland, the Netherlands, and other European states have debated similar prohibitions. Islamic dress restrictions for teachers exist in some Swiss and German states.

France also forbids people from wearing any headgear in official identity document photos. In 2011, the UN Human Rights Committee concluded that this rule violated the religious freedom rights of a Sikh man who refused to remove his turban for a residency-card photo. France has yet to take corrective action.

Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, and Iceland have long banned kosher and halal slaughter. In 2011, the Dutch parliament"s lower house also passed such a ban, but an outcry from Muslim and Jewish groups forced the government to forge a compromise allowing religious animal slaughter to continue.

After a similar outcry in Germany this year against a lower-court ruling criminalizing religious circumcisions of male children, the German parliament is considering a law permitting this practice.

Efforts against religious circumcision persist in other parts of Europe. Norway"s Center Party, a small party in parliament, has sought to criminalize it, and the ombudsman for children-an independent governmental body-has suggested that Muslims and Jews replace circumcision with "a symbolic, non-surgical ritual.”

In Germany and Sweden, government authorities have told Christian and Jewish parents that they cannot homeschool their children for religious reasons.

Government officials in the United Kingdom are forcing Catholic adoption agencies to shut down because they follow religious criteria in placing children with families.

What is driving this rise in restrictions? At least two factors are at play - one historical, the other demographic.

The first factor is Western Europe"s unfortunate history of monolithic state religion. The rise of secular states did little to change the idea of a religious monoculture-it just included secularism as one of the monocultures. Indeed, "lay” states such as France and Turkey have long enforced secularism as the only acceptable form of behavior in public affairs, while countries like Norway treat their official churches as vestigial organs.

The second factor is the region"s growing religious diversity, including a rising population of Muslims. The distinctive dress of conservative Muslims has fueled a fear of "the other” as well as a doubling down in already-existing opposition to public religious expression. While governments cite the need for national security, restrictions on religious expression risk creating exactly the opposite outcome. They drive a wedge between governments and their Muslim citizens, dashing hopes for much-needed cooperation to prevent radicalization and promote the assimilation of democratic values and identity in Muslim communities.

Couched as attempts to protect established values, government laws and policies prohibiting religious expression and practice specifically violate human rights. Such actions defy internationally recognized religious-freedom standards established in United Nations treaties and also protected by European human rights documents from the European Union, Council of Europe and Helsinki process.

These standards guarantee the right not just to believe but to manifest one"s beliefs, individually or in community with others, in public or in private, through worship, observance, practice and teaching. This includes the right to wear distinctive symbols, clothing or head coverings, follow dietary rules and practice rituals connected with certain life stages. Any limitations on these freedoms must be narrowly construed and based on grounds specified by Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. They must not discriminate in application, destroy guaranteed rights or derive from a single tradition alone.

The increasing restrictions on religious practice and expression in Western Europe both arise from and encourage a climate of intolerance against religious groups, especially those with strong truth claims and vigorous demands on their members. Muslims, in some instances, clearly are being targeted. This increasingly hostile atmosphere in turn triggers private discrimination, and sometimes even violence, against members of these groups.

Indeed, according to the U.S. State Department"s International Religious Freedom Report on France, the number of anti-Muslim assaults, harassment, and vandalism increased 34 percent in 2011.

If the lamp of liberty is to remain lit, Western Europeans must accept that the age of conformity to an official monoculture-secular or religious-is at an end. In the coming year, their countries should embrace their religiously diverse future and accord religious freedom to all.

Mary Ann Glendon serves as vice chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). Azizah al-Hibri serves as a USCIRF Commissioner.

To interview a USCIRF Commissioner, please contact Samantha Schnitzer at [email protected] or (202) 786-0613.

For Your Information

July 6,2011| By: William Shaw and Nina Shea

The following op-ed appeared in The Hill on July 6, 2011.

On July 9, the world will witness the birth of a new nation and a triumph for religious freedom and related rights. The people of South Sudan chose independence in a January referendum mandated by a comprehensive peace agreement (CPA), of which the United States was the primary broker. Signed in 2005, the agreement ended Sudan"s 22-year north/south civil war.

The war was triggered by the brutal attempts of the Khartoum regime in the north to impose its extremist version of Islam, leading the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), on which we serve, to deem it among the world's most egregious religious freedom abusers. Of the two million Sudanese dead, four million driven from their homes, and many forced into slavery, most were southern Christians and followers of traditional African religions, as well as hundreds of thousands of Nuba Muslims declared apostate and targeted in the same conflict by President Omar Hassan al-Bashir"s regime.

Today, in South Sudan, religious freedom conditions have dramatically improved. The threat that sharia will be the binding law of the land has lifted. Southern churches are no longer bombed or shuttered. Muslim and Christian communities are at peace with each other.

Yet as we applaud South Sudan"s freedom, we must not ignore the continued problem of Khartoum and the people it still abuses. While north and south have separated politically, their fates remain intertwined.

Bashir"s recent military incursions into South Kordafan and Abyei, provinces on South Sudan"s doorstep, are red flags, given Khartoum"s history, from southern Sudan to western Darfur. Once again, Bashir"s forces reportedly have bombed, pillaged, and murdered civilians, causing massive numbers to flee, while barring unhindered humanitarian access.

Throughout northern Sudan, severe human rights abuses, including religious freedom violations, continue, affecting Muslim and non-Muslim Sudanese. Khartoum enforces religiously-based morality codes, with violators often beaten. It denies the right of non-Muslims to public religious expression and persuasion and rarely permits churches to be built. While promoting conversion to Islam, it keeps conversion from Islam a capital crime and tortures suspect converts. Further, Bashir stated that after South Sudan became independent, he would make sharia law the basis of a new northern constitution, violating the CPA and dissolving its human rights institutions. Finally, Bashir"s regime could strip southerners in the north of their citizenship and other rights.

Khartoum"s course is tyrannical and dangerous. It risks instability on South Sudan"s northern border, continued war and insecurity within its own borders, and a bleak future for religious freedom and related human rights.As a pivotal actor, the United States must remain engaged. Its involvement helped end the north/south war and the south"s religious oppression. As a guarantor of the CPA, our government needs to take action.

What can the U.S. do?

First, it can sanction the Bashir regime for its egregious religious freedom violations.

Two sanctions are already in place. In 1997, President Clinton sanctioned the regime by employing the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). And since designating Sudan as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) in 1999, deeming it a severe religious freedom violator, the State Department has required the U.S. to oppose Khartoum"s receiving any loan or other funding from international financial institutions.

Recognizing its continued religious freedom violations, the United States should leverage these sanctions as Khartoum creates a new constitution and new institutions.

Most important, the U.S. should remain committed to bringing about a just and lasting peace for both north and south. To that end, it can further leverage its influence over Khartoum by considering the expansion of the scope of sanctions to include asset freezes and travel bans against Khartoum and its officials for threatening the peace, and encouraging allies to do likewise.

It should work with the CPA signatories to implement the peace agreement"s remaining provisions in the still-war-torn Nuba mountains and in Abyei. It should urge that the constitution-drafting process in both the North and South be transparent and inclusive, incorporating international religious freedom standards and recognizing northern Sudan as a multi-religious, multiethnic, and multicultural nation.

Let the birth of South Sudan be the start of a journey toward freedom and peace for all Sudanese citizens.

Nina Shea and Rev. William Shaw serve as commissioners on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).

To interview a USCIRF Commissioner please contact Samantha Schnitzer at [email protected] or (202) 786-0613.