More than 2.2 billion people live in countries where government
restrictions on religion or social hostilities involving religion rose
“substantially” in recent years, a new report says.
Restrictions
on religious beliefs and practices substantially rose between mid-2006
and mid-2009 in 14 of the world’s 198 countries and substantially
decreased in eight countries, says the Pew Forum’s report “Rising
Restrictions on Religion.”
Countries with rises in government
restrictions on religion included Algeria, Egypt, France, Hong Kong,
Kyrgyzstan, Libya, Serbia and Malaysia.
Ten countries had a
substantial increase in social hostilities: Bulgaria, China, Denmark,
Mongolia, Nigeria, Russia, Sweden, Thailand, the United Kingdom and
Vietnam.
Restrictions on religious beliefs and practices are
“particularly common” in countries that prohibit blasphemy, apostasy or
defamation of religion. By mid-2009, 59 countries had such laws, rules
or policies at some level of government. Penalties ranged from fines to
imprisonment or death and were enforced in 44 of the 59 countries.
“While
such laws are sometimes promoted as a way to protect religion and
reduce social hostilities involving religion, in practice they often
serve to punish religious minorities whose beliefs are deemed unorthodox
or heretical, and who therefore are seen as threatening religious
harmony in the country,” the Pew report said.
Social hostilities,
including mob violence, occurred more often in countries with such laws.
Eighty percent of the countries in the Middle East-North Africa region
have such laws and these are enforced in 60 percent of them. Nearly 40
percent of European countries have such laws and 31 percent of countries
actively enforce them.
The report also cited French discussion on
whether women should be allowed to wear the burqa as well as government
attempts to declare the Church of Scientology to be a “criminal
enterprise.”
In Serbia the government refused legal registration for
Jehovah’s Witnesses and several other minority religious groups. Some
Serbian officials referred to minority religious groups as “sects” or
“other pejorative terms,” Pew said.
Christians were harassed in
130 countries while Muslims were harassed in 117. Jews faced harassment
in 75 countries, Hindus faced harassment in 27 countries, while
Buddhists faced harassment in 16. Members of other religious groups in
84 countries reported harassment.
The report said harassment and
intimidation take many forms, including physical assaults, arrests, the
desecration of holy sites and discrimination against religious groups in
employment, education or housing. Harassment also includes verbal
assaults.
Christians experienced governmental and social
harassment in about the same number of countries, while Jews experienced
social harassment in many more countries than they faced government
harassment.
In recent years there were at least 1,300 annual hate crimes in the U.S. involving religious bias, FBI reports say.
The
Pew report was based on 18 sources of information, including reports
from the United Nations, the U.S. State Department and Human Rights
Watch.
Since the time period covered by the report, social
tensions and government restrictions concerning religious belief have
flared up in some countries.
Controversies over mosque construction and
Catholic adoption agencies’ desire to follow Christian ethics when
placing children continue to arise in the United States.
In Egypt,
Coptic Christian women are increasingly forced to marry and convert to
Islam.
Forced conversions are also a problem in Pakistan, where
extremist defenders of the country’s strict blasphemy law have
assassinated several high-ranking government officials who have
criticized the law.
The communist government of Vietnam has been
accused of religious freedom violations, including detention of priests
and crackdowns on Catholics seeking the return of confiscated property.
Leonard Leo, chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious
Freedom, has called for the country to be re-designated as a Country of
Particular Concern for its “particularly severe violations of religious
freedom.”
In June 2011, over two years into the Obama presidency,
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hosted the swearing in of Baptist
pastor Suzan Johnson Cook as the Ambassador-at-Large for International
Religious Freedom.
Critics saw the delay in her appointment as a sign of
the Obama administration’s lack of vigilance concerning global
religious freedom.