THE US COMMISSION ON INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO


THE US COMMISSION ON
INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS

FREEDOM: CHALLENGING THE
STATUS QUO

By Leonard A. Leo and Don Argue

S
ince the United States was founded,
freedom has been its cornerstone, and
religious freedom—the right to accept or
reject a religion or belief system

according to one’s conscience, and practice it
freely and peacefully—has been a pivotal right.1

Freedom of religion or belief is the first liberty to
appear in the First Amendment to the US
Constitution.

For billions of people abroad, religion is a
powerful source of identity, meaning, and
purpose, and the freedom to practice one’s own
religion or belief system remains paramount. Yet
according to a Pew Research Center study
released in August 2011, 70 percent of the
world’s population dwells in countries where
religious freedom is highly restricted.2

Throughout much of the globe, religious
freedom and related human rights are egregiously
and routinely violated. Created by the 1998
International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), the
US Commission on International Religious
Freedom (USCIRF), on which we serve, reports
on countries whose governments engage in or
tolerate severe abuses, such as detentions,
disappearances, imprisonment, torture, and mass
murder. USCIRF makes independent
recommendations to the President, Secretary of
State, and Congress on behalf of reform.

Religious freedom abuses—whether caused
by government action or inaction—should not go
unnoticed or unchallenged. This is not just an
opinion of the United States or a reflection of its
First Amendment, but a basic tenet of
international human rights law. In 1948, the
international community created and adopted the
landmark Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, including Article 18, which states that:

Everyone has the right to freedom of
thought, conscience and religion; this right
includes freedom to change his religion or
belief, and freedom, either alone or in
community with others and in public or
private, to manifest his religion or belief in
teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Leonard A. Leo served as Chair of the US Commission on International
Religious Freedom from 2009 to May 2012 and was originally appointed as a
Commissioner in 2007 by President George W. Bush. He is currently the
Executive Vice President of the Federalist Society for Law & Public Policy
Studies. He has been active in several international forums, including service
as a US delegate to the UN Commission on Human Rights.

Don Argue served as Vice Chair of the US Commission on International
Religious Freedom from 2010 to March 2012 and was originally appointed as
a Commissioner in 2007 by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He served on
the President’s Advisory Committee on International Religious Freedom during
the Clinton Administration, and was also appointed by President Clinton to
the first official delegation of US religious leaders to visit China to discuss
religious freedom. He is currently Chancellor of Northwest University.

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Since 1966, the governments of 167 countries
have signed the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights (ICCPR), a binding treaty
that includes language similar to Article 18 of the
1948 Declaration. Nations around the world also
affirmed the 1981 Declaration on the
Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of
Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief, as
well as other instruments that confirm that
freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or
belief is a universal and fundamental human
right.

Standing for religious freedom around the
world is a humanitarian, moral, and legal duty. It
is also a practical necessity, one that is crucial to
the security of the United
States and the post-9/11
world. Time and again,
research has found that
countries that honor and
protect religious freedom
have more vibrant political
and democratic institutions,
rising economic and social
well-being, diminished
tension and violence, and greater overall stability.

In contrast, nations that trample on or fail to
protect basic human rights, including religious
freedom, provide fertile ground for poverty and
insecurity, war and terror, and violent, radical
movements and activities. The assassinations in
2011 of two high-ranking government officials in
Pakistan for their opposition to blasphemy laws
remind us of how religious extremism and
religious freedom violations are destabilizing a
critical partner and creating a climate of impunity
by fueling hatred and violence against both
Muslims and non-Muslims.

In today’s battle against terrorismand extremist
ideology, the key is to offer a competing—and
compelling—vision of freedom, peace, and
prosperity, and a foreign policy that places a
premium on the freedom of thought, conscience,
and religion/belief that advances this effort.

Supported by America’s culture and heritage,
backed by international law and treaty, and made
indispensable by critical security needs, the right
to freedom of religion or belief for all deserves the
US government’s strong and steadfast support.

USCIRF Activities
It was in response to violations of this right

that Congress passed IRFA in 1998, which
created USCIRF, as well as the Office for
International Religious Freedom in the US
Department of State and the position of
Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious
Freedom. As the only government commission of
its kind in the world, USCIRF was structured by
Congress as an independent and bipartisan
federal government commission with the capacity
to speak candidly and act effectively in pursuit of
its mission.

The Commission leverages its strengths in a
variety of ways. It gathers information at home

and abroad, issues annual
reports to the executive
branch and Congress, and
works in conjunction with
advocates of human rights
and religious freedom in
every arena, including
congressional offices on both
sides of the aisle. The
Commission also advises and

works closely with the White House and State
Department officials, members of academia, and
religious and civil society leaders, and it has
participated in multilateral meetings with the
United Nations, European Union, and the
Organization for Security and Co-operation in
Europe (OSCE).

Each year, along with its annual report,
USCIRF provides policy recommendations to the
US government in accordance with IRFA. The Act
requires the President, who has delegated this
function to the Secretary of State, to designate as
“countries of particular concern” (CPCs) those
nations that commit systematic, ongoing, and
egregious violations of religious freedom. These
nations qualify as the world’s most severe religious
freedom violators. The Commission recommends
countries that, in its view, meet the CPC
threshold. For 2012, USCIRF recommended that
the following countries be designated as CPCs:
Burma, China, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria,
North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan,
Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan,
and Vietnam.

RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM AND

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

VIOLATIONS ARE

DESTABILIZING A CRITICAL

PARTNER AND CREATING A

CLIMATE OF IMPUNITY

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Along with CPC recommendations, the
Commission also provides recommendations to
the US government for dealing with nations
placed on USCIRF’s Watch List. The list
includes countries where religious freedom
violations engaged in or tolerated by their
governments do not meet the CPC threshold but
are serious enough to require close monitoring.
The Watch List provides advance warning of
negative trends that could develop into severe
violations of religious freedom, thereby providing
policymakers with the opportunity to engage
early, increasing the likelihood of preventing or
diminishing violations. As of 2012, the following
countries were placed on USCIRF’s Watch List:
Afghanistan, Belarus, Cuba, India, Indonesia,
Laos, Russia, Somalia, and Venezuela.

USCIRF Highlights from the Past
Decade

Since its inception, USCIRF has made
important strides in advancing freedom of
religion and related human rights.

First and foremost, the Commission has
succeeded in raising the overall profile of religious
freedom with the US executive branch and
Congress through its letters, public statements,
hearings, travel, and participation in international
meetings and conferences. Working with
Congress, USCIRF’s policy recommendations
and findings have been acknowledged and
incorporated into dozens of bills and resolutions
over the past decade. Working with federal
agencies, the Commission has collaborated,
shared information, and provided advice on
matters relating to religious freedom. USCIRF
also has met with high-level officials, including
foreign dignitaries from numerous countries, to
press the case for the right to religious freedom.
The Commission has been cited frequently in the
media, and has been quoted or referred to in
articles, editorials, and opinion pieces in leading
publications and broadcast news reports.

Second, USCIRF has played a positive role on
key issues relating to freedom of thought,
conscience, and religion or belief. Among these
issues is reforming US refugee and asylum policy,
specifically the United States government’s
treatment of asylum seekers fleeing severe

violations of religious freedom and related human
rights. In 2005, USCIRF released a study
containing recommendations on how the federal
Departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and
Justice could improve the treatment of asylum
seekers in expedited removal.3 In 2007, the
Commission issued a report card grading the
response of these agencies.4 Following publication
of the 2005 study, the Justice Department
announced some measures to protect legitimate
asylum seekers and improve the way the
immigration courts and the Board of Immigration
Appeals were performing. Based on USCIRF’s
recommendations, DHS appointed its first Senior
Refugee and Asylum Policy Advisor in February
2006. In 2009 and 2010, through its Immigration
and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), DHS
announced changes in its parole determination
policies and conditions of detention that also
reflected the Commission’s recommendations.

Another key issue is the so-called “defamation
of religions” resolution through which the
Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC)
repeatedly has sought a global consensus for an
international law against blasphemy. Years of
effort by USCIRF, the State Department,
members of Congress, and nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) helped bring about a
marked decrease in the support for the resolution
between 2008 and 2010.

As a result, in 2011 the UN Human Rights
Council instead adopted consensus resolutions on
“combating intolerance, negative stereotyping and
stigmatization of, and discrimination, incitement
to violence, and violence against persons based on
religion or belief.”5 The new resolutions properly
focus on protecting individuals from
discrimination or violence, instead of religions
from criticism; protect the adherents of all religions
or beliefs, instead of favoring one religion; and do
not call for legal restrictions on peaceful
expression, but positive measures, such as
education and outreach. The new resolutions call
for criminalization only in the case of incitement
to imminent violence, which is the US First
Amendment standard. USCIRF welcomes this
new approach, but remains concerned that the
OIC has not abandoned its global anti-blasphemy
efforts. The United States and other UN member

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states that support universal human rights must
remain vigilant.

Besides its successes in drawing greater
attention to freedom of religion or belief and in
advancing key issues relating to this right, a third
way in which USCIRF has moved the ball forward
has been its responses to specific countries that are
severe violators of this freedom. In Sudan, the
world witnessed a significant triumph for religious
freedom when a free and fair referendum took
place in the south in January 2011 and led to the
birth of South Sudan in July. The referendum
resulted from the Comprehensive Peace
Agreement (CPA), signed in 2005, which ended
the 22-year North–South civil war that the
Khartoum regime triggered by its militant
attempts to impose its radical version of Islam on
southern Sudanese Christians and animists.

The Commission had long made Sudan a
critical issue. In 2001, USCIRF successfully
recommended that the President create the
position of a special envoy to coordinate efforts to
bring peace to Sudan. The efforts of the special
envoy helped lead to the CPA. In recent years,
USCIRF called for Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton’s direct engagement in the
implementation of the CPA and was
instrumental in strengthening working ties
between the government of South Sudan and
religious groups that proved essential for
facilitating voter education and turnout during
the referendum process. The Commission also
helped bring together Southern Sudanese with
the US judiciary and other public and private US
institutions to help begin the process of providing
capacity-building and technical assistance to an
independent South Sudan.

Another example is North Korea. The
Commission released two reports that provided
unique information on the religious freedom
violations of one of the world’s most notorious
human rights abusers.6 Featuring extensive
interviews with refugees, the reports affirmed that
North Korea’s radical hostility to religion played a
major role in the torture, imprisonment, and
execution of Christian refugees repatriated from
China, and revealed North Korea’s draconian
attempts to halt Protestantism’s spread from China.
This was the latest chapter in a grim story of how

North Korea’s once-vibrant religious life has been
supplanted by a quasi-religious cult of personality
centered on its dictatorial leader and his son.

In Iran, in response to the government’s
systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of
religious freedom, USCIRF has called repeatedly
for the US government to identify Iranian officials
and entities responsible and impose travel bans and
asset freezes on those individuals. Previously, no
sanctions against Iran had targeted human rights
violations; the Commission worked with
congressional offices to develop such sanctions.

These sanctions are included in CISADA, the
Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability,
and Divestment Act (PL 111-195). CISADA
requires the President to submit to Congress a list
of Iranian government officials, or persons acting
on their behalf, who are responsible for human
rights and religious freedom abuses; bars their
entry into the United States; and freezes their
assets. The executive order President Obama
issued in September 2010 sanctioned eight
Iranian officials for having committed serious
human rights abuses after the Iranian presidential
election in June 2009. Five more Iranian officials
—along with three governmental entities—have
since been sanctioned, bringing the total number
of sanctioned officials to 13. Prior to the passage
of CISADA, the Commission had recommended
sanctions for a number of Iranian officials,
including eight of the 13 sanctioned thus far.

Concerning Russia, USCIRF was one of the
first official US bodies to call attention to the
steady rise in violent hate crimes against members
of certain ethnic and religious communities,
including members of religious minority
communities, from Muslims and Jews to
Jehovah’s Witnesses. This effort helped lead to
official Russian recognition of hate crimes as a
major problem. The Commission also was the
first US government entity to undertake an in-
depth study of Russia’s 2006 NGO law and its
wide-ranging effects on religious communities.

In Saudi Arabia, in February 2012, King
Abdullah pardoned Hadi Al-Mutif, an Ismaili
Muslim man who had been one of the longest-
held religious prisoners in the world since being
jailed in 1994 on charges of apostasy. For years,
USCIRF had highlighted his case and advocated

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with high-level Saudi officials and the US
government for Al-Mutif’s release. In addition,
due to USCIRF’s engagement, six young Shi’a
Muslims in Saudi Arabia were released in
February 2011. USCIRF raised concerns about
these individuals during its January/February
2011 visit. The six were released on February 23,
2011 after a year in detention without charges,
despite a limit of six months for pretrial detention
under the Saudi criminal procedure code.

The Commission has focused sustained
attention on extremist references in Saudi
textbooks, which teach hatred toward other
religions and, in some cases, promote violence.
Funding originating in Saudi Arabia is used
globally to finance radical religious schools and
mosques, hate literature, and other endeavors that
support religious intolerance and, in some
instances, violence toward non-Muslims and
disfavored Muslims.

One of the countries reportedly impacted by
this funding is Pakistan. In November 2011,
USCIRF released a groundbreaking report,
“Connecting the Dots: Education and Religious
Discrimination in Pakistan.”7 This study of
Pakistani students and teachers in madrassas
(religious schools) and public schools revealed
widespread attitudes of religious intolerance,
which fostered societal discrimination against the
nation’s religious minority communities. These
attitudes of intolerance can lead to acts of
violence, such as the assassination in January
2011 of Salman Taseer and in March 2011 of
Shahbaz Bhatti, government officials who were
ardent defenders of human rights and religious
freedom and staunch opponents of Pakistan’s
blasphemy law. It was USCIRF that had
introduced the US government to Minister
Bhatti and his vital work. After Minister Bhatti

was slain, the Commission worked with
congressional offices to have a resolution
introduced in his honor that pressed for
improvements on these issues.

Conclusion
By any measure, the battle to promote and

protect the right to freedom of religion or belief
around the world remains an uphill one. From its
inception, USCIRF has been charged with the
essential mandate of highlighting abuses and
recommending positive steps the US government
can take in response. In creating USCIRF,
Congress unveiled a model that fits the mandate
—a bipartisan entity that operates as a truly
independent commission within the federal
government.

In December 2011, Congress reaffirmed its
support by reauthorizing the Commission,
ensuring that USCIRF will continue to have an
independent voice in helping raise the
importance of religious freedom and related
human rights to US foreign policy, offering
timely advice, and bringing greater accountability
to the process.

In the struggle for freedom, USCIRF and like-
minded organizations have a critical advantage in
today’s information age. With instant
communication available through the Internet and
social media platforms, the calls for protection of
this fundamental right are being amplified as never
before. They are being heard across nations and
continents, demanding an end to the status quo of
repression and impunity. The inescapable message
they bring is clear: religious freedom matters, as do
other human rights, and must be honored. It is
time for governments around the world to hear
and heed this vital message, for the sake of freedom
and dignity, prosperity, and security. v

1. Portions of this essay are adapted from our article “International Religious Freedom: Why it Matters and How to Protect It,” published in the summer
2011 issue of International Affairs Review.

2. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “Rising Restrictions on Religion.” August 9, 2011 http://www.pewforum.org/Government/Rising-Restrictions-
on-Religion(2).aspx

3. USCIRF, “Report on Asylum Seekers in Expedited Removal.”

4. USCIRF, “Expedited Removal Study Report Card: Two Years Later.”

5. UN Human Rights Council, Resolution 16/18.

6. See USCIRF, “‘Thank You, Father Kim Il Sung’: Eyewitness Accounts of Severe Violations of Freedom of Thought, Conscience, and Religion in North Korea,”
and USCIRF, “A Prison Without Bars: Refugee and Defector Testimonies of Severe Violations of Freedom of Religion or Belief in North Korea.” Beginning in
2009, USCIRF partnered annually with The Database Center for North Korean Human Rights on annual religious freedom status reports.

7. USCIRF, “Connecting the Dots: Education and Religious Discrimination in Pakistan.”

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http://www.pewforum.org/Government/Rising-Restrictions-on-Religion(2
http://www.pewforum.org/Government/Rising-Restrictions-on-Religion(2


References
Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. “Rising Restrictions on Religion,” August 9, 2011. Online at http://www.pewforum.org/Government/Rising-

Restrictions-on-Religion(2).aspx (accessed May 1, 2012).

UN Human Rights Council. Resolution 16/18, adopted March 24, 2011. Online at http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/G11/127/27/PDF/
G1112727.pdf?OpenElement (accessed May 1, 2012).

US Commission on International Religious Freedom. “Report on Asylum Seekers in Expedited Removal,” February 8, 2005. Online at http://www.uscirf.gov/
index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1892 (accessed May 1, 2012).

US Commission on International Religious Freedom. “‘Thank You, Father Kim Il Sung’: Eyewitness Accounts of Severe Violations of Freedom of Thought,
Conscience, and Religion in North Korea,” December 2005. Online at http://www.uscirf.gov/images/stories/pdf/nkwitnesses_wgraphics.pdf (accessed
May 1, 2012).

US Commission on International Religious Freedom. “Expedited Removal Study Report Card: Two Years Later,” February 6, 2007. Online at http://www.
uscirf.gov/news-room/press-releases/284-february-6-2007-uscirf-expedited-removal-study-report-card-two-years-later.html (accessed May 1, 2012).

US Commission on International Religious Freedom. “A Prison Without Bars: Refugee and Defector Testimonies of Severe Violations of Freedom of Religion or
Belief in North Korea,” March 2008. Online at http://www.uscirf.gov/images/A_Prison_Without_Bars/prisonwithoutbars.pdf (accessed May 1, 2012).

US Commission on International Religious Freedom. “Connecting the Dots: Education and Religious Discrimination in Pakistan,” November 2011. Online at
http://www.uscirf.gov/images/Pakistan-ConnectingTheDots-Email(3).pdf (accessed May 1, 2012).

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