ICC Note:

According to a new report by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), Pakistan is among the top countries who abuse the religious freedom of minorities found within their borders. Christians, who only make up 2% of Pakistan’s population, are among those minorities who are forced to suffer both discrimination from the government and open hostility from radical elements within Pakistan’s Sunni Muslim majority. Blasphemy laws, forced conversions, church bombings, grinding poverty and discrimination only begins to fill out the list of abuses experienced by Christians and other religious minorities within Pakistan. USCIRF is recommending Pakistan be designated a “Country of Particular Concern” for its religious freedom abuses. Please pray for Christians in Pakistan as they face near constant persecution.

5/1/2014 Pakistan (Deseret News) – Pakistan is a world leader in oppressing religious minorities, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom declared in a report released Wednesday, with Iran closing in on the top spot and Russia becoming a cause for concern with its recent restrictions against Muslims and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The 209-page report is the 15th by the USCIRF, and the commission’s chairman said in a teleconference with journalists that the global religious liberty situation is not improving as much as it should, and is in fact getting worse in some nations.

“There’s no shortage of places where abuses occur,” said Robert P. George, a Princeton University legal scholar. “And the news on (the religious liberty) front is very bad: … 76 percent of the world’s people live in countries where significant religious freedom violations are tolerated or committed with impunity,” George added, citing January 2014 data from the Pew Research Center.

Religious liberty is a global concern for the United States, George said, not only “for humanitarian reasons, but also because nations that trample on religious freedom provide ample ground for war, poverty and violations of human rights. It’s a practical necessity in the world today.”

He called on the Obama administration to put more teeth into its pronouncements that nations should respect citizens’ rights to believe as they wish, to change their faith, and to share their faith publicly, tenets of Article 18 of the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

“We feel Republican and Democratic administrations, burdened as they are … we’re concerned that with the burden of all those other concerns, the focus on religious freedom has been lost,” George said.

Blasphemy Death Sentences

Draconian blasphemy laws have put 36 people on death row or serving life sentences in Pakistan. George said that dissenting from the majority Sunni Islam faith — as is the case with Shia’a and Ahmadi Muslims — is grounds for blasphemy charges, which have also been leveled at Christians in that country.

The Ahmadi situation, both George and the USCIRF report note, is particularly perilous. “The constitution declares members of the Ahmadi religious community to be ‘non-Muslims,’ and the penal code makes basic acts of Ahmadi worship and interaction criminal offenses. They also are prevented from voting,” the report stated.

The USCIRF report recommends that Secretary of State John F. Kerry continue to list Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Uzbekistan as “countries of particular concern,” or CPCs.

The USCIRF commissioners — who operate independently of the State Department — also recommend adding Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Vietnam to the CPC list.

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