By Paul Eckert, Washington
The United States has named eight countries
as the world’s worst violators of religious liberty.
Asian communist states
China, North Korea and Vietnam, as well as military-run Burma, were described
in an annual State Department report to Congress as serious violators of religious
freedom . China and its neighbours joined Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Eritrea
as nations designated as "countries of particular concern", the State
Department said.
"These are countries where governments have engaged
in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom over the past
year,"
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters as she unveiled
the report, covering 197 countries.
She said Vietnam, which remained on
the list of worst violators, had made progress in 2005, including signing a pact
with Washington over how it would improve religious rights.
"If Vietnam’s
record of improvement continues, it would enable us to eventually remove Vietnam
from our list of countries of particular concern,"
Dr Rice said.
The
US envoy for international religious freedom, John Hanford, said Hanoi had made
some "very significant efforts to improve religious freedom", including
passing new laws, releasing 14 prisoners and opening some closed churches.
The
report placed China, North Korea and Burma on a list of authoritarian states that
"regard some or all religious groups as enemies of the state because of their
religious beliefs or their independence from central authority". In China,
which restricts worship to state-sanctioned groups, "religious leaders and
adherents, including those in official churches, were detained, arrested or sentenced
to prison or re-education through labour camps".
The report said Beijing
had placed under heavy scrutiny and sometimes harassed underground Christian groups,
Muslims of the Uighur ethnic minority, Tibetan Buddhists and members of Falun
Gong, a meditation sect.
Falun Gong has doggedly criticised China since Beijing
banned it in 1999.
"While the Falun Gong are not officially a religion,
more a spiritual movement, the suffering that they’ve endured is unspeakable,"
Mr Hanford said.
"There have been so many who have been arrested,
thousands and thousands, many who have died in police custody."
Dr
Rice denied there had been any wavering in the US commitment to global human rights,
despite disclosures of secret prisons run by the CIA in Eastern Europe.
She
came under sharp questioning from reporters about the Bush Administration’s policies
on treatment of suspected terrorists detained in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/washington-names-worst-religious-freedom-violators/2005/11/09/1131407700709.html?oneclick=true
Posting date: 15/Nov/2005
Original article date: 10/Nov/2005
Category:
Media Report
