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Activists flay US report on religious freedom

Human rights groups have strongly criticised a US government report for failing to designate Turkmenistan a country of particular concern (CPC) on the issue of religious freedom. "Turkmenistan's government still refuses to allow residents of the country to practice their faith freely," Felix Corley, the editor of Forum 18 News Service, an agency monitoring religious freedom in the former Soviet republics and eastern Europe, said from London on Thursday. The largely desert, but energy-rich state denied its 5.5 million inhabitants the right to religious freedom, despite longstanding international pressure to reform, Corley argued, citing continued persecution of minority religious communities such as Jehovah's Witnesses and Baptists, with police raids on prayer meetings, arbitrary arrests and beatings. But religious persecution remained very much across the board, he added. Turkmenistan's majority Muslim community was tightly controlled, while the country's Russian Orthodox Church had been denied re-registration for refusing to allow its parishes to become independent of the Central Asian diocese headquartered in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, Corley noted. "Minority faiths cannot function freely," the activist said. "Even some of those recently registered still cannot meet freely without being harassed, raided and fined." His comments follow the release of the seventh US Annual Report on International Religious Freedom, examining the status of religious freedom around the world in several countries, including CPCs. According to the 8 November report to the US Congress, which is mandated by the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) of 1998 and seeks to examine barriers to religious freedom in individual countries, Georgia, India, Turkmenistan and United Arab Emirates had showed "significant improvement" in the protection and promotion of religious freedom through modification of legal and social barriers over the past year. But Corley asserted such an assessment was premature and for religious freedom to arrive in Turkmenistan, the government needed to end the ban on unregistered religious activity and stop raiding religious meetings, while at the same time allowing religious communities to build and maintain places of worship freely. He is not alone is his call. On Tuesday, a coalition of NGOs released a statement disputing the report's conclusion that Turkmenistan, alongside Uzbekistan, was not a CPC, describing such an appraisal as inconsistent with the report's own findings and therefore unjustified. Indeed, under the statutes of the International Religious Freedom Act, any government that engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom in that country over the proceeding 12 months is to be designated as a CPC. "Given the overwhelming evidence of severe and widespread violation of religious freedom in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan during the period under consideration, the conclusion that these governments have not 'engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom' is factually incorrect, and therefore in violation of the statute," a coalition statement read. On 10 November, Michael Cromartie, chairman of the US Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), described the omission of both Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan from the CPC list as "particularly troubling" and a discredit to Congress's intent in passing the IRFA. "In the face of the severe religious freedom violations perpetrated by the Turkmen and Uzbek governments, the continued failure to name them as CPCs undermines the spirit and letter of the IRFA," he said.

This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions

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