The largest religious liberty event of the year challenged the brutality of China and Russia but also noted that democratic countries such as Japan look like dangerous intoxicated drivers.
by Massimo Introvigne
There are enemies and there are friends. But when friends are drunk and are driving cars, it is in the best interest of the friendship to persuade them to stop. This persuasive metaphor was used by Katrina Lantos Swett, who was twice Chair of the USCIRF (U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom), to describe the attitude other democratic countries should have towards Japan. There, a misguided crusade against the Unification Church (now called Family Federation for World Peace and Unification) has led to a request for its dissolution and to laws and regulations severely limiting the liberty of all religions.
Lantos Swett was speaking in a plenary session at the International Religious Freedom (IRF) Summit 2024 at the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington DC about the post-Abe-assassination crisis in Japan, where I also spoke together with Susan Johnson Cook, former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom; W. Cole Durham, Director of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah; and Ján Figeľ, former European Commission Special envoy for the promotion of freedom of religion outside of the European Union. Members of the Unification Church shared stories of being kidnapped and confined in an attempt to deprogram them and compel them to abandon their faith, and of the discrimination that has hit them in the last few years in Japan.
The testimony of Moriko Hori was especially powerful. She is President of the Women’s Federation for World Peace International, an organization founded by the leader of the Unification Church Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon, but with a large percentage of members who are not part of the Unification movement. After the assassination of Shinzo Abe, the Federation was slandered by Japanese anti-cultists and media and its women were consistently discriminated. And now Japan is extending its attacks against the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and who knows who will be next.
Lantos Swett is one of the Chairs of the IRF Summit, together with another former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, Sam Brownback. The IRF Summit has emerged as the largest religious liberty gathering in the world, with thousands of participants and booths and workshops presenting the problems of many different religions in several countries.
As Ján Figeľ noted, the 2024 IRF Summit shows that progress has been made since the Abe assassination in 2022. While originally in the U.S. there was a certain reluctance in criticizing Japan, a crucial ally in Asia, it is now almost taken for granted that the country has created the worst religious liberty crisis in the democratic world. Not the only one, though: when it comes to religious liberty, Japan at times looks like the drunk driver among democratic countries, but other drivers are intoxicated too, including France, whose draft amendments aimed at making its already bad 2001 law against the “cults” even worse were also mentioned.
Almost everybody who is somebody in the world of religious liberty advocacy attended the Summit, including Czech Republic’s Ambassador Robert Rehak, the Chairman of the International Religious Freedom or Belief Alliance, a pro-religious-liberty coalition of 37 countries; former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence; the United Nations’ current Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, Nazila Ghanea; Fiona Bruce, the United Kingdom Special Envoy for Freedom of Religion or Belief; Rashad Hussein, the current U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom; the current speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Johnson; and hundreds of members of Parliaments, religious leaders, journalists, NGO leaders, and academics from all over the world.
The drunk drivers from democratic countries are one half of the problem. Although their repression of religious minorities is less bloody, the fact that it happens in a democratic context makes it a bad example for the rest of the world. The other half of the problem of freedom of religion is totalitarian or not fully democratic regimes. There are drunk drivers of cars in Japan or France but there are also those who drive tanks and consciously try to crush religious liberty under their wheels. The metaphor is particularly apt to describe the ferocious repression of freedom of religion in the Ukrainian territories Russia has illegally occupied, but it also describes what happens in Russia proper, in China, in North Korea, in Nicaragua. Many witnesses identified China as the worst country in the world for religious liberty, including Uyghurs such as Rushan Abbas, activists for the freedom of Hong Kong such as Benjamin Rogers, defenders of persecuted Christian house churches such as China Aid’s Bob Fu, Falun Gong practitioners, and Tibetan Buddhists. And while Pakistan eagerly awaits its elections this month, its laws punishing blasphemy with the death penalty, the violence against the Ahmadis and other minorities, the kidnapping, forced conversion to Islam, and marriage to Muslims of Hindu and Christian girls, often minors, with the police looking the other way, do not allow to consider it a fully democratic country. Elsewhere, Muslims are discriminated, or anti-Semitism uses criticism against the government of Israel to raise again its ugly head. Christian continue to be slaughtered in Nigeria and Bahá’ís in Iran.
It is of course impossible to mention in a single article all the cases of violations of religious liberty discussed at the IRF Summit 2024. “Bitter Winter” is proud of having been acknowledged in several sessions as a precious resource for the international movement that is trying to put freedom of religion or belief in its rightful place, at the center of the global effort to promote human rights. And we leave Washington with the voice of the Uyghur and Ukrainian victims of totalitarian tanks and of the Japanese victims of drunk drivers in our hearts.