Transcript: Amb. Seiple/Rabbi Saperstein on Religious Freedom
(March 30 meeting with NGOs and press in Geneva)The American people, Ambassador-at-large for International Religious Freedom Robert Seiple told journalists and representatives of non-governmental organizations, "feel very, very strongly about religious freedom."
Seiple, who with Rabbi David Saperstein, chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, is in Geneva for the United Nations Commission on Human Rights meeting.
He explained to reporters in a March 30 opening statement that Congress, through a law it passed unanimously, the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 requires his office to report annually on religious persecution taking place around the world.
Seiple said his office was particularly concerned about five countries, but he and Saperstein focused on two -- China and Sudan.
In the past year, Seiple said, China "was engaged systematically in an ongoing fashion in egregious violations of human rights."
Worse, he added, "there is a great deal of intention to it. And there is a great deal of persecution associated with it. Illegal detentions, torture during detentions, killings, executions in various parts of the country, with virtually of all the people of faith in that country.
"China," he observed, "does not like what it can't control, does not like what it can't understand, and religion is something that is not understood well by the communist authorities."
The U.S. diplomat drove home his point with the example of a sixty-year-old woman who was jailed because she was a member of the Falun Gong.
A few days later, Seiple added, "her daughter was called to come and pick up the body. When her daughter came, the body was bruised from head to toe. There was bleeding from the mouth and the eyes and the ears. The teeth were broken.
"This is a sixty-year old woman," Seiple exclaimed, "taken to jail, and beaten to death." Rabbi Saperstein supported Seiple's characterization of China's record of religious persecution.
"It is hard to think of any country that is as much of an equal opportunity discriminator as China is," Saperstein said.
"Every religious group is touched by the restrictive actions and legislation in China and some of the most egregious cases, as we heard earlier today about Tibet, but also the Uighurs and the Falun Gong and the house churches, the Protestant and the Catholic communities, all of these are affected and many more," he charged.
Saperstein called Sudan "a humanitarian disaster of the first order."
"There are many forms of violations of human rights [in Sudan]," he said. "Many parties are involved in such violations, but disproportionately it is driven by the government in Khartoum. We are particularly concerned about the religious impact of that. Religion is used as tool of prosecuting and furthering these human rights abuses in the civil war."
Following is a transcript of their opening statements: (begin transcript)
Ambassador Robert Seiple
Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedomand
Rabbi David Saperstein
Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious FreedomOpening statements at
Discussion with NGOs and the Press
March 30, 2000
Palais des Nations, GenevaThank you very much. We were here a year ago and we talked about religious freedom to a large group of NGOs, and had a round table on the subject, and we're here again one year later, not take necessarily to take all the time speaking to you, but to talk to you a little bit on what has happened in the intervening year and then really to get your comments and your questions and hopefully some provocative discussion going on about this issue, this critically important issue, especially as you look at the countries that have become very, very important to this particular Commission.
We, in the United States, put together some legislation in 1998 which I can go on in depth to tell you what it was designed to do, but let me just summarize it this way. It was design to shine the light on anyone who this day has to suffer marginalization, discrimination, persecution because of how they believe, whom they believe, where do they believe, what they believe, and also protect the right not to believe, so even the atheists and the agnostics get protected by the international religious freedom act of 1998 in the United States.
We are mandated by that act to put together a report every September. That report is now available. It has been available since last September. You can find it on the Web site: www.state.gov , thanks to Joseph Rees here, we were able to put it together in hard copy, and if anyone would like its own personal copy, if you'll give me your card at the end, I will send you a copy, it's about 500 pages of religious freedom as we saw it.
We took information from many, many resources around the world, made sure that the information was credible, responded to the issues that had been raised and used the principle basically of mutual accountability to call attention to this specific human rights abuse anywhere in the world.
By the way, it is not hard to get information for the most part. One of the problems that despotic governments are facing, is that their populations know what is going on, and they have cell phones and fax machines and the ability and the wherewithal to get that information to the world. It is what to do with the information. And that's really what this Commission is all about, what this Commission in the next several weeks will do with the information that is factually there incontrovertibly clear, and now we have the accountability to act on that information.
We are in the business of promoting religious freedom, not punishing people necessarily, but promoting, trying to find ways to work with governments to look at things that make sense, to make sense through a government, but basically to make sense to those who are there suffering because of their beliefs.
We would much rather do that and move the diplomatic ball forward, than to look at sanctions, or look at a break in dialogue or anything else. Sometimes, of course, that happens, but hopefully not often.
If you would read the preamble to our act, it looks like it reads right out of the various international instruments that you are all familiar with. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. There is a sense of universality about it and that's very important. Because I don't want anyone to think that we think that this was simply an American idea we thought we would foster upon an unsuspecting world. This idea has been around internationally for a long, long time, but the American people feel very, very strongly about religious freedom.
So this came to a vote, it was unanimous in our Congress. If you know anything about Washington DC in 1998, very few things were unanimous. This was. So, the strength of the American people is behind it.
The report is made up each year from information that we get from our posts around the world, information that we get from NGOs, information from the human rights establishment, from letters that we receive, from people that comes by and meet with us from the faith communities, from the diasporas that take place all around the world. And by the time we get to massaging the last report there is a great deal of information that we have to work with. If you are from a country that feels you got short changed, or we did something wrong , we made mistakes, let us know. The beauty of an annual report is that you get the chance to fix it, you get the chance to add to it, you get the chance to enhance it. We like the first one. We think that it did a great deal for religious freedom around the world, we think it helped institutionalize this concept with our own folks, here and around the world but at he same time we are also want to improve upon it.
Now, part of the act mandates that we designate countries of particular concern. Last year we designated five countries, one of which was China, and I want to talk just briefly about China. What we found with a very careful look at all the reports that we had, reports from our own posts, from the faith communities in China, that China was engaged systematically in an ongoing fashion in egregious violations of human rights, and that there is a pattern to it. It happened over and over again in many places throughout the country. There is a great deal of intention to it. And there is a great deal of persecution associated with it. Illegal detentions, torture during detentions, killings, executions in various parts of the country, with virtually of all the people of faith in that country. China, quite frankly, does not like what it can't control, does not like what it can't understand, and religion is something that is not understood well by the communist authorities. I am not talking about the Chinese people. And so what they don't understand and they can't control, they repress. And unfortunately we can recite chapter and verse, but it is in the report on China that we thought we had to do this. Religion is not a benign issue in China. And the context for persecution is documented as the specifics that actually took place.
Now let me just wrap up my first portion of this by telling you two stories of the past several weeks. I say this because we have only been here a day, but we have heard a lot about procedural matters. We don't want the faces of those who are suffering to get lost in a no-action procedure, or the inability of people, the NGO community, our countries, our longtime human rights activists to be shut down and unable to speak. We don't want the faces of those we feel to serve to get lost in a legal brief. To be put behind the newest fig leaf of consensus voting.
We have heard today already talking with people the practicality of Realpolitik. And we are here to talk about real people as opposed to talking about Realpolitik. And let me give you a couple of examples of what has happened recently in China. A sixty year old woman, taken to jail because of her belief, she happened to be a member of the Falun Gong. A few days later her daughter was called to come and pick up the body. When her daughter came, the body was bruised from head to toe. There was bleeding from the mouth and the eyes and the ears. The teeth were broken. This is a sixty-year old woman. Taken to jail, and beaten to death. This issue has a face. This issue has a name. This issue has a personality. An 80-year old priest, who had already spent 30 years in jail because his allegiance was to Rome and not to Beijing: 150 gendarmes come in the middle of the night, and arrest him, taking him to jail. This is the face. This is the face of this issue. I am glad, in the Tibetan discussion -- some of you were there a couple of hours ago -- that people spoke candidly and forcefully to unmask the inherent contradiction of a no-action vote from this body, when there are people who are losing their lives, giving their lives around the world.
Religion is an interesting issue. People will die for their faith. People will kill because of their religion. It's a passionate issue. It's a key issue in geopolitical workings today.
We can see it in the last 15 years in the kinds of wars that have been fought. We need to understand it. We need to lift it up. But more importantly, we made to make sure that it has a face, the face of people who this day are suffering because of their faith.
Rabbi David Saperstein
I am going to speak equally briefly. I want to address this from a different perspective. I want to talk about what the United States did. We were thinking about it as a model for how other countries could do something similar in their settings. And therefore I want to talk about some of the concepts underlying the legislation and the instrumentality created what the goals were, and the impact it has actually had in furthering those goals.
First, the political factors that led to the passage unanimously of this legislation. There were a number of them that came together. There were people who care about human rights that have been concerned that of all of the protected human rights under international conventions, the one that tended to get the least attention and the least action, both in the unilateral actions of nations, and the multilateral actions of human rights forums, was the issue of religious freedom. And there had been a growing impetus to raise that up -- in the United States, action on human rights, and in international forums of which we were a part. Secondly, many groups were beginning to organize around particular case of religious persecution. Many of them represented by people in the forum earlier today with Tibet and others who were in the room, many of them represented by people here in this room right now. And third, there was an alarming rise of religious persecution that we saw in the world scene, and that is becoming identified with people of a variety of religious backgrounds and faiths. Over the past 20 years and in particular in the 1990s. All this led the Congress to act in passing this law.
If those where the political dynamics, what were the goals? And the goals were three. First to lift the issue of international religious freedom in the international forums of which we are a part, secondly to lift it in American foreign policy, something I will focus on in my last part of my remarks. And third, to act more effectively in a multilateral capacity wherever possible, but unilaterally where necessary on behalf of those who were persecuted. Hence the identification of some of those who do engage in egregious, systemic, on-going persecution and a requirement of the legislation that the President of the United States, choose some particular response to that persecution from a list of a variety of choices that the legislation presented to the President.
Those were the goals. What impact then has it had? Well first of all sometimes there is the inestimable and somewhat ephemeral source of effective impact that comes from things you can never predict. In this case, I have to say quite honestly, that ephemeral factor that effected us in great measure was the choice of Robert Seiple as the first ambassador. In creating what is, as far as I know, the first ambassadorship in the world for religious freedom and in choosing Bob, it chose someone whose knowledge, intelligence and integrity and the respect that he was accorded by so many on the international scene as well as in the United States, really was the right person at the right time.
Secondly, it made -- and I say this to the compliment of my friends from the staffs of the Democratic and Republican committees of the United States Congress represented here -- it made a very brilliant maneuver. And that is, it required the Ambassador's office to issue an annual report. And what that requirement did was to structure the need for every embassy in the world to assign someone to research this, to make connections with religious groups, to speak to government officials and persecuted groups, and groups that if not persecuted were subject to discrimination. And to issue a very detailed written report back to Washington. It then required every regional bureau in our State Department to evaluate those reports and to decide exactly how they wanted to word it. And it required the highest levels of the State Department to make decisions about which countries would be designated as countries of particular concern and make recommendations to the President as to what the response should be. In the very act of requiring the report, all of these things flowed from it. And that has lifted up the issue in the lives of our Embassies and foreign service personnel in ways that nothing else we could have done would have achieved. It has really had a remarkable impact. And we feel now that every time we travel, every time we travel and one of the members of our commission, and I will come to in my final point, every time that one of us travels, we meet in embassies people who research this issue, who know the issue, in a way that just wasn't true before. In conversations that we have had with other governments, we may not be able to replicate the same thing, but we meet governments now who are taking our reports, sending them out to their posts, and asking the evaluation of this report.
Where have we not done an adequate job? Where have things changed since the report was issued in the first of September. So even where countries aren't going to create an Ambassadorship and aren't going to mandate the formalization of the report, they are using this report as a benchmark, a measuring rod, a launching pad, for their own staffs to begin to look at this and make recommendations, here, so it is having an effect beyond the United States on a structural level as well, and that's one of the things I want commend to NGOs from different countries, who have a presence in different countries, and those of you who are representatives of other nations. To think about ways of structuring that kind of impact and involvement of your foreign service structure on this issue. We can talk afterwards about a number of countries where this has already had some success by the involvement of the American Embassies there and issues, mostly in the areas of specific cases or in the areas of registration laws. From Central Asia to Eastern Europe, there are a number of different places around the world where we've worked with the religious human rights community to help prevent laws that really would have been a setback for religious freedom. Finally, the Commission itself. The Congress created an independent commission. It is a ten person commission with Ambassador Seiple sitting ex officio and those nine other people, five are appointed by the President's party, whoever the President is at any given time, these have to be renewed every two years, and four appointed by the other party. It is a cross section, politically and religiously, of America. We decided to focus on three things in our beginning year. The first was to focus on two countries that represented countries of particular concern, or most egregious examples.
One is China. It is hard to think of any country that is as much of an equal opportunity discriminator as China is. Every religious group is touched by the restrictive actions and legislation in China and some of the most egregious cases, as we heard earlier today about Tibet, but also the Uighurs and the Falun Gong and the house churches, the protestant and the catholic communities, all of these are affected and many more. The other country is Sudan, that I will make my final remark on.
Secondly, we looked at country that represented something entirely different. A country struggling with these issues, trying to do the right thing in many regards, but seeing worsening conditions there, at a point we could still intervene, and where the United States had some influence. That country we chose was Russia. Not that things were worse than in many other places, but because it is such an important country. If Russia gets it right, many of the former Soviet Union countries will get it right. And therefor we felt it was a priority for us.
And third, to deal with the structural issue within the United States government foreign service life, and that is working with the Foreign Service Institute that trains our Foreign Service officers to do a better job in training about religious freedom issues, both in general and as to the specific situations in the countries where they will be serving. Not just at the entry level, but also at the DCM and Ambassadorial level, retraining programs as well here. And that is already beginning to have an impact as well.
I am finally going to just mention another country of particular concern, Sudan. Sudan is a humanitarian disaster of the first order.
There are many forms of violations of human rights. Many parties are involved in such violations, but disproportionately it is driven by the government in Khartoum. We are particularly concerned about the religious impact of that. Religion is used as tool of prosecuting and furthering these human rights abuses in the civil war. It will not surprise those of you who follow Sudan that the situation, because this is the beginning of the dry season -- every year it worsens. We now have reports emerging over the past five days of attacks by militias, supported by the government of Sudan in the Bahr al Jabal area, in the Blue Nile, there seems to be a major troop movement of government forces into this area. Obviously the oil revenues from the pipeline give them economic resources to pursue the war. They are buying Chinese equipment and other equipment that is more advanced than they have had before. There has been an enormous expansion of bombing of civilian targets over the last week. So we are seeing a serious worsening of the civilian situation in the South in fear that those oil revenues are going to give the government in Khartoum the belief that they can buy the equipment necessary to actually win the war and that will lead to a significant worsening of the situation. It is a time to move forward as forcefully as we can. The IGAD and other diplomatic initiatives to resolve the issues in Khartoum but also for the human rights communities to speak out again. We have not seen the proposed resolution that the EU is working out in consultation with many other countries. The rumors are that it does not go as far as the one proposed last year. That would be, from our perspective, a major setback for the cause of human rights.
One of the nice things about the Commission is it was created to be independent. I don't have to check anything with the State Department and we are free here to say whatever we want about issues here and that gives us a great deal of leeway to hear from you about issues you think the U.S. ought to be more forceful about and wherever we find merit in that, it is our key responsibility to make recommendations directly to the President and to the Secretary of State and to the leadership of the Congress of what they can do. That is a partnership that I hope to begin right now, as we open it up to you to hear any questions that you might have, but from our standpoint, even more importantly, recommendations you have of issues that the United States ought to be addressing.
(end transcript)
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