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US group investigates religious liberty in Russia
2003-030-6
2/13/2003
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[Episcopal News Service]
A US government advisory group is investigating freedom of religion in Russia following the leak of a Russian government report that suggested Roman Catholics, Protestants, Muslims and new religious movements threaten national security. The document, leaked in December, was a draft drawn up by Russian Nationalities Minister Valentin Zorin and the Moscow-backed Chechen leader, Ahmad Kadyrov.
The report prompted a visit to Moscow in January by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, set up in the United States under the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act. Felice Gaer, the commission's head, told journalists during her visit that the state of religious liberty in Russia was 'fragile.' But she said she would refrain from making any conclusive statements until the commission published its annual report in May.
'Russia attracted the interest of the commission from the very start,' Gaer said. 'Not because it requires a special concern, like Sudan--it was not the severity of the problem but the fragility of religious freedom and all freedoms in Russia.' Gaer said before the Moscow visit that the leaked report reflected 'a disturbing trend in Russia that includes the exclusion of representatives of the [Roman] Catholic Church, restrictions on the rights of new and minority religious movements, recurrent anti-Semitic incidents, as well as the equation of Islam with terrorism.' In a January 15 letter to the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, Gaer urged him to raise his country's concern 'at the highest levels of Russian government.'
Gaer said in Moscow that commission members had asked Russian officials during talks why a dozen or so Catholic and Protestant clergy had been denied visas last year. 'We've been told that reasons to deny visas is something governments never provide information about,' she said. 'We have raised that issue. The number [of denials] is significant enough that it can't be accidental. We think it is a serious development.'
During the trip, the commission also looked into claims of religious discrimination in Russia's regions, violence against minority groups, whether the government has a tendency to get involved in internal religious disputes and whether the government cooperates with the Russian Orthodox Church to the detriment of other faiths. 'We can say that the picture looks fragile,' Gaer noted.
Last year, the commission recommended that the State Department designate North Korea, Laos, Saudi Arabia and Turkmenistan as 'countries of particular concern.' But the State Department added only North Korea to its watch list, which also includes countries such as Myanmar, Iran, Iraq and Sudan.
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