Book Notes

Religious Freedom in the World: A Global Report on Freedom and Persecution. Edited by Paul Marshall. Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2000. Pp. 335. $14.99, paper.

Religious Freedom in the World, a project of the Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom, reports on the persecution suffered by adherents of major religious groups. The book begins by framing the issue of religious freedom in four essays that precede seventy-five detailed country profiles. Three additional essays provide regional overviews of the status of religious freedom in Western Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Latin America. The last and most substantial section of the book presents the rated profiles of seventy-five countries, which together compose more than ninety percent of the world’s population, on a scale of religious liberties. The resulting coverage on religious freedom and persecution makes Religious Freedom in the World an important and much needed contribution to this increasingly pressing human rights issue.

Nina Shea, head of the Center for Religious Freedom, observes in “Religious Freedom and American Foreign Policy” that for most of the 1990s, the Clinton administration marginalized human rights concerns in American foreign policy. More specifically, Shea argues that the administration failed to develop a comprehensive human rights policy on religious persecution. According to Shea, “[i]f human rights policy was an island, then religious freedom in the early and mid-1990s was the drowning man in the life raft, off the island, off the mainland” of American foreign policy.[1] Shea illustrates the lack of attention to religious freedom issues in China and Sudan, two countries with the most intense religious persecution according to Shea. In spite of the administration’s inattentiveness, grassroots coalitions of religious groups rallied in support of legislation on international religious persecution. Legislative efforts culminated with the passage in 1998 of the International Religious Freedom Act,[2] which creates four mechanisms to integrate concerns about international religious persecution into American foreign policy. Should American foreign policy proceed by affecting the policies of the worst offenders through “engagement” or isolation?

Shea forcefully advocates a policy of isolation to weaken the political power and bankrupt regimes committing genocide. An example of such a regime, in her view, is the Khartoum regime in Sudan, which for several years has mounted aggressive campaigns at forcing Christians and believers in traditional African religions in southern Sudan to convert to Islam.

Shea’s essay persuasively underscores the current lack of understanding about the complex context and effects of religious persecution abroad. It sidesteps, however, the initial task of elaborating the premise of religious freedom as a foreign policy cause. Some basic questions need to be addressed first if the ignorance shrouding this topic is to be lifted. What is the nature of religious persecution such that focusing policy on it would contribute to the current policy debate on human rights more generally? How and why can religious freedom be a vehicle for democratization and liberalization? Even if the connections between religious freedom and other civil and political rights may seem obvious, the causal links between them need further elaboration if the cause of religious freedom is to garner support as a national interest. Like many other human rights causes, an informed, mobilized public may prove to be the ultimate catalyst for reform.

In the next three essays, Paul Marshall addresses some of the questions left open by Shea, including (1) what is religious persecution and (2) why should we be concerned about religious persecution. Marshall defines religious persecution as persecution “where the focus or the grounds are themselves religious.”[3] According to Marshall, the basic question in identifying religious persecution is “whether some or all of the oppression and discrimination that people suffer would occur if they or their oppressors were of a different religion.”[4] The question, then, is how to ascertain what would happen if the persecutor or persecuted belonged to a different religion.

Marshall, however, does not tell us how to answer this difficult question. The question is especially complex when one considers that a people’s religious identity is often inextricably intertwined with its ethnic and political identity. Marshall recognizes that in some cases religion may not be the only, or even the key, factor. But he argues that it is “absurd to examine a political order without attending to the role of religion.”[5]

This brings us again to the question of how to analyze the role played by religion. The criteria later elaborated for the country profiles and the several questionnaire items following Appendix 2 suggest measures that may begin to distinguish between religious and non-religious factors that curtail basic civil and political rights. If Marshall hopes to correct what he criticizes as the prevailing “secular myopia,”[6] he needs to explain more thoroughly how

one can actually identify and appreciate the independent explanatory power of religion.

The importance of identifying a religious factor may be the strong correlation between religious freedom and political and civil liberties. In Marshall’s view, religious freedom is an integral part of civil rights. He notes that “this means that restrictions on the press necessarily involve restrictions on the religious press, that restrictions on freedom of association necessarily imply restrictions on religious association, that restrictions on speech necessarily imply restrictions on religious speech.”[7] But given the interaction between religious and other factors of repression, why is a special emphasis on religious freedom warranted? What is the difference between analyzing a government’s restrictions on free press and the same government’s antipathy towards religious publications?

Marshall argues that an understanding of a conflict’s religious context is necessary for accurate diagnosis and policy prescriptions. Marshall also attempts to make clear that religious rights do not compete with, but rather complement and reinforce, other human rights. Critics may argue that the cause of religious freedom responds to narrow Christian particularities. Religious Freedom in the World, however, makes clear its advocacy for all groups to enjoy religious liberties.

Marshall observes that religious freedom is not an exclusively Western phenomena nor is religious persecution confined to any one area or continent, but rather affects all religious groups. Every continent contains relatively free countries, such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan in Asia, Brazil in Latin America, and South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia in Africa. Nevertheless, large regional variations do exist: the Western European and North Atlantic areas score the highest, while the Islamic countries are the areas with the largest current restrictions on religious freedom. And although critical of the Reports on Religious Freedom issued by the State Department, a requirement under the 1998 International Freedom Act, Marshall agrees with their conclusion that religious freedom has deteriorated and religious persecutions have increased during the last five years.

After framing the importance of religious freedom, the book proceeds with overviews of trends in religious freedom in three different regions of the world. In Western Europe, Willy Fautre, head of Human Rights Without Frontiers in Brussels, observes an unsettling trend of government participation in discrimination against religious minority groups.[8] France, Belgium, Germany, and Austria use the term “sect” to distinguish between established religions and unconventional religious movements.[9] Often de-

scribed as harmful, government authorities have targeted sects and deprived sects’ followers of the exercise and enjoyment of certain human rights.[10]

Religious liberty has also deteriorated in the former Soviet Union. Michael Bordeaux, a noted authority on religious freedom issues in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, observes that with the exception of the Baltic States, the “whole area of the former Soviet Union has failed to implement the kind of religious liberty for which there were such high hopes in 1991 when communism and its atheist policies finally collapsed.”[11] Although many religions have experienced revivals since 1991 in Russia, a new law passed in 1997 aims to encourage and protect the Russian Orthodox Church atop a hierarchy of religions.

In contrast to the former Soviet Union, the transition to liberal democracy in most Latin American countries has brought about a dramatic increase in religious pluralism. Paul E. Sigmund, professor of politics and former director of the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton University, observes the narrowing of the gap between a constitutionally recognized freedom of worship and the practical reality of religious freedom in this region.[12] Sigmund attributes this to constitutional reforms in almost every Latin American country that have modified the special position occupied by the Catholic Church.[13] Sigmund includes in his essay the key constitutional provisions on church and state of various Latin American countries. The increasing promotion of human rights and democracy in Latin America bodes well for the enjoyment of religious liberties in the region. This regional overview of trends in religious freedom in Latin America, along with the other two regional overviews covering the Former Soviet Union and Western Europe, provides a succinct, useful discussion of important legal and political developments affecting religious practices in the region in question.

Yet, the section of regional essays contains some glaring omissions. Neither Africa nor Asia received their own regional overviews. This seems puzzling given the existing and increasing levels of religious persecution in China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Sudan documented elsewhere in the book.

The last section of the book contains detailed country surveys ranking countries on a standard scale of religious freedom using criteria based on several human rights treaties and on a list developed by Willy Fautre. For those familiar with the Freedom House’s Freedom in the World annual reports of political and civil liberties, these newly developed assessments of religious freedom should be a welcome complement to that more established political publication. Each country profile contains a background section, developed

from overall profiles featured in the 1998-1999 edition of Freedom in the World, and a report on the status of religious freedom in each country. The survey seeks to present comparisons between countries to “see whether any patterns occur, and eventually discern whether any systematic change occurs over time,” making Religious Freedom in the World an indispensable tool for comparative analysis.[14] Readers, especially religious freedom advocates and lawyers representing religious asylum seekers, would benefit even more from the book’s coverage if it contained more ample documentation of the facts reported and conclusions reached.

Religious Freedom in the World makes an impressive contribution to the cause of religious freedom. It offers a sobering account of the global status of religious persecution, and it has the potential to transform skeptics about the role of religion in world affairs. The troubling reality is that many governments routinely deny religious freedom to their citizens. This fact should disturb anyone concerned about the health of civil society. Religious Freedom in the World brings this neglected area of human rights to the fore.

[1]. Nina Shea, Religious Freedom and American Foreign Policy, in Religious Freedom in the World: a Global Report on Freedom and Persecution 1, 2 (Paul Marshall ed., 2000).
[2]. International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, Pub. L. No. 105-292, 112 Stat. 2812 (1998).
[3]. Paul Marshall, The Importance of Religious Freedom, in Religious Freedom in the World: a Global Report on Freedom and Persecution 9, 9 (Paul Marshall ed., 2000).
[4]. Id.
[5]. Id. at 13.
[6]. Id. at 9.
[7]. Paul Marshall, The Current State of Religious Freedom, in Religious Freedom in the World: A Global Report on Freedom and Persecution 18, 21 (Paul Marshall ed., 2000).
[8]. Willy Fautre, Western Europe: Trends in Religious Liberty, in Religious Freedom in the World: A Global Report on Freedom and Persecution 28 (Paul Marshall ed., 2000).
[9]. See id. at 30.
[10]. See id. at 33.
[11]. Michael Bourdeaux, The Former Soviet Union: Trends in Religious Liberty, in Religious Freedom in the World: A Global Report on Freedom and Persecution 35, 42 (Paul Marshall ed., 2000).
[12]. Paul E. Sigmund, Religious Freedom in Latin America, in Religious Freedom in the World: A Global Report on Freedom and Persecution 43 (Paul Marshall ed., 2000).
[13]. See id.
[14]. Paul Marshall, The Nature of Religious Freedom and Religious Persecution, in Religious Freedom in the World: a Global Report on Freedom and Persecution 14, 14 (Paul Marshall ed., 2000).

Copyright © 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Harvard Human Rights Journal / Vol. 14, Spring 2001