February 4th, 2010 by Maria

Yesterday, POMED released a report about the briefing for the House Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight about the status and future of U.S. policy on international religious freedom. Thomas F. Farr, a professor at Georgetown and former American diplomat, was one of the panelists who presented at the briefing.

A PDF file of Farr’s full remarks can be found here.

Some highlights from Farr’s remarks include:

• “Our international religious freedom efforts are widely viewed abroad as only benefiting Christian minorities, as a front for Christian missionaries, and as anti-Islam. This perception is, let me say it firmly, utterly wrong. Indeed, if anything, U.S. foreign policy has tended to downplay the fates of Christian minorities in the Middle East and elsewhere. And it has advocated for the rights of Muslims. But perception is critical, and, in this case, the perception of our international religious freedom policy as pro-Christian and anti-Islam is crippling.”

• “Let me focus here on one critical issue — the President’s Cairo speech and his much praised strategy of engaging Muslim majority communities. It was a good speech. A significant portion was devoted to issues of human dignity and stability, namely, democracy, religious freedom, women’s rights, and development…The president told Muslim communities that religious liberty is central to human dignity and to social and political stability. In light of this, we are entitled to ask why his administration has so far ignored international religious freedom policy in the Muslim world.”

• “…Young Muslim leaders are telling us that they want democracy, and, like most Americans, they want to hear from the United States that we will support democracy in all Muslim majority countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and that we will support the rights of Muslims to engage in political life on the basis of Islamic principles. But to achieve this and the other benefits of democracy, Muslim majority communities must embrace religious freedom for others. This means members of their own communities must be able to interpret and even criticize their own traditions; that majorities must forswear privileged access to the civil authority and police powers of the state; and that minorities must have complete freedom of worship and equal access to the democratic public square, and the opportunity to influence law and public policy.”

Posted in Congressional Hearing Notes (House), Egypt, Freedom, Human Rights, Iran, Islam and Democracy, Saudi Arabia, US foreign policy |