State Dept. Releases Annual Religious Freedom Report: News Roundup
“We are troubled by what we see happening in many, many places” (Bloomberg).
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton released the State Department’s 2010 Report on International Religious Freedom (State Department), an annual examination of “the legal status of religious freedom as well as the attitudes towards it, in almost 200 countries and territories around the world” (Human Rights First).
Afghanistan, China, Iran, Uzbekistan and Egypt were just a few of the countries accused of limiting religious freedom.
The State Department analyzes countries based on five categories:
- Authoritarian governments
- Hostility toward nontraditional and minority religious groups
- Failure to address societal intolerance
- Institutionalized bias
- Illegitimacy
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton defined religious freedom in simpler terms, calling it “the ability to raise children in one’s faith, share that faith peacefully with others, publish religious materials without censorship, and change one’s religion by choice, not coercion” (Bloomberg).
News outlets from all over the world covered how countries fared in the report.
The Tibet Post International reported that “China continues harassment of Tibetan Buddhists and such infringements on religious freedom "strain" bonds that back democratic societies.”
The Jerusalem Post noted that Israel was criticized for "governmental and legal discrimination against non-Jews and non-Orthodox streams of Judaism."
The Southeast European Times mentioned that in the Balkans “attacks and discrimination based on religious identity continue in the Balkans, but due to the interconnectedness of ethnicity and religion it can be hard to determine the motive for these acts.”
The Pakistan Christian Post reported that in Pakistan “the number and severity of reported cases against religious minorities increased.”
The Calgary Herald (Canada) focused on Afghanistan highlighting that “intolerance in the form of harassment, occasional violence, discrimination, and inflammatory public statements by members of parliament and television programming targeted members of non-Muslim minority groups.”
In other news…
The American Humanist Association’s has particularly aggressive “holiday” ad campaign this year (Washington Post), juxtaposing violent passages from religious texts with peaceful messages from humanists, in an attempt to woo the 15% of Americans who say they have no religion (USA Today).
A 10-year-old boy in Malaysia was caned by his Assistant Principal for bringing fried rice with pork in it to school for lunch (Monsters and Critics).