Where Your Religion Can Still Send You to Jail

Mary Ann Glendon, Katrina Lantos Swett

Society,

"State actors from China to Iran to Uzbekistan continue their own assault on freedom."

December 10 marks Human Rights Day, the sixty-seventh anniversary of the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Unfortunately fundamental rights, including religious freedom, are still being violated worldwide.

Among the worst abusers are non-state actors like ISIL and other violent religious extremist groups. In Syria and Iraq, ISIL has persecuted Shia and Sunni Muslims alike, while reserving some of its worst depredations for Yazidis and Christians. From summary executions to forced conversions, rape to sexual enslavement, abducted children to destroyed houses of worship, attacks on these communities—among the oldest in the Middle East—are part of a systematic effort to erase their presence.

State actors from China to Iran to Uzbekistan continue their own assault on freedom: witness the persistent presence and gross mistreatment of prisoners of conscience.

In order to spotlight the plight of these prisoners, as well as the repressive laws and policies of the governments holding them, the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of the U.S. House of Representatives in conjunction with the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), on which we serve, and Amnesty International USA, created the Defending Freedoms Project. Through this project, members of Congress select prisoners in order to call culpable governments to account and ultimately help free these prisoners.

Among these governments are those USCIRF has recommended to the State Department for designation as “countries of particular concern,” or CPCs, marking them as some of the world’s worst religious freedom abusers.

China, for example, imposed the draconian sentence of life imprisonment on Ilham Tohti in September 2014 for “separatism,” due to his peaceful activism on behalf of his fellow Uighur Muslims, whom the government persecutes relentlessly. Tohti was an economics professor in Beijing, where he was known for his research on Uighur-Han relations as well as his activism for the implementation of regional autonomy in Xinjiang.