U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom 2021 Annual Report
WASHINGTON-
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom released its 2021 annual report Wednesday (April 21), recommending that the U.S. government continue to designate China as a “country of particular concern” for systematic, ongoing and grave violations of religious freedom. The report also calls on the U.S. government not to send officials to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing if persecution of religious freedom by the Chinese Communist Party authorities continues.
The report, released Wednesday, examines the state of religious freedom worldwide in 2020. In the China section, the report says religious freedom in mainland China continues to deteriorate: Communist authorities have intensified their “Chinese-ization of religion” policy, particularly targeting religions with perceived foreign ties, such as Christianity, Islam and Tibetan Buddhism; continue to use advanced high-tech surveillance technology to monitor and track religious minorities; and implement new regulations on religious groups. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) Commissioner Tukhay Tukhay further limited the scope of religious groups’ activities by implementing new regulations.
Nury Turkel, a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, told VOA, “China’s Communist government views any religion, especially Islam and Christianity, as disloyal to the party and considers believers and religious practitioners to be a potential threat to Communist rule and stability. Our concern in the past was that the CCP was interfering with individual religious practices. But now they have changed their approach from government regulation of religious practice to government control or criminalization of religious practice. The CCP is trying to use its own ideology to forcibly replace other traditional religious practices that have been passed down to the Chinese population for hundreds or even thousands of years.”
In Xinjiang, the report said, CCP authorities continued to detain Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims in internment camps and continued the mass closure and demolition of Uighur religious sites; detainees were reportedly tortured, raped, sterilized, and otherwise abused, and there were reports of forced labor of Uighurs. In addition, Communist authorities continue to tightly control and suppress Tibetan Buddhism and to harass and arrest members of the Catholic underground and Christian house churches.
Most worrisome, Tukel said, are the genocidal actions of the Chinese Communist authorities against Muslim minorities such as the Uighurs. He said, “Genocide and crimes against humanity are being committed in the world’s second-largest economy, the second-largest economy with which the international community is deeply engaged, which has built industrial-scale concentration camps.”
The U.S. government has characterized the persecution of Muslims, including the Uighurs in Xinjiang, by the Chinese Communist authorities as genocide and crimes against humanity. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended that the U.S. government urge other countries to conduct independent investigations and determinations on this issue and to take joint action to hold the CCP accountable.
The Commission also recommended that Washington continue to use existing laws to impose targeted financial and visa sanctions on Chinese government agencies and officials who commit serious violations of religious freedom.
In addition, the Commission called on the U.S. government to “publicly express its concerns about the Chinese Communist Party’s hosting of the 2022 Winter Olympics and state that U.S. government officials will not attend the Beijing Winter Olympics if the Chinese Communist authorities’ crackdown on religious freedom continues.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, established in 1998 under the International Religious Freedom Act, is a nonpartisan federal government agency responsible for monitoring and evaluating religious freedom around the world and making recommendations to the U.S. government. Since its first annual report in 1999, the Commission has annually recommended that China be listed as a “country of particular concern” because of the Chinese government’s systematic, persistent and serious violations of religious freedom.
Most of the commission’s recommendations last year were considered or adopted by the U.S. administration and Congress, including imposing sanctions on Communist Party officials for serious violations of religious freedom and recommending that Congress support bills on Tibet and Xinjiang.
Beijing imposed sanctions on the commission’s chairman Gayle Manchin and vice chairman Tony Perkins in March in retaliation for previous sanctions imposed by the United States and several Western allies against the Chinese Communist Party over human rights in Xinjiang.
In a previous interview with the Voice of America, Perkins said this reflects the fact that the Chinese Communist authorities are beginning to feel pressure from the international community and are trying to divert attention. He also said that the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom will not back down from Beijing’s sanctions, but will redouble its efforts to continue to condemn China’s serious violations of human rights and religious freedom.
Shortly after the USCIRF released its annual report, Republican U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Texas) proposed an amendment to a bill on the Chinese Communist Party that would require the United States to conduct a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics in Beijing and not send any diplomats to the games.
A day earlier, a Vatican-backed Catholic charity also released a report on global religious freedom. The report noted that the Chinese Communist Party and Burma have committed the most serious violations of religious freedom. The report found that China’s Communist government has become more focused in its policy-making, more intense and widespread in its repression of religious freedom in recent years, and more sophisticated in its techniques, the most serious of which were the atrocities against Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, “so extensive that a growing number of experts are calling them genocide.”
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