Refugee activities in democratic countries should be understood by considering that they have escaped China for religious rather than economic purposes.
by Massimo Introvigne
“Bitter Winter” commented a recent decision by the Court of Rome, which on June 14, 2024, granted full asylum to a member of The Church of Almighty God (CAG), judging her deserving of the “highest form of protection” in Italy. In this recent decision, the court stated that the most reliable sources agree that just being a member of the CAG exposes devotees to the risk of being jailed and tortured in China. The court also accepted works by scholars, including the undersigned, articles by “Bitter Winter,” and reports by U.S. federal agencies on religious liberty as reliable evidence of the CAG persecution in China, dismissing information spread by Chinese embassies, directly or through fellow travelers, as false.
The Rome decision is particularly detailed, but it is not new. In 2021, together with a leading American academic specialized in law and religion issues, James T. Richardson, and with former Lithuanian diplomat Rosita Šorytė, I published in an academic journal a long article listing dozens of favorable decisions obtained by CAG refugees in some fifteen different countries, dismissing the usual objections. Also in 2021, the United Nations Committee against Torture ruled against Switzerland, which had denied asylum to a CAG devotee, stating that CAG members in China, or deported to China after their asylum requests have been denied abroad, are “at risk of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
It is, however, not enough for courts in democratic countries to accept as a fact that CAG members are severely persecuted in China and at risk of detention or torture if they are deported back there once they have managed to escape abroad. Courts, both civil and criminal, should also understand how these refugees live.
There is a deplorable tendency of expanding the notion of “human trafficking” beyond its original limits, targeting religious organizations that use unpaid volunteers for their missionary or charitable activities. China and its fellow travelers have seized the opportunity to accuse CAG and other religion-based refugees in the West to engage in “human trafficking” by “smuggling” co-religionists out of China and moving them from one country to another. As explained in the article I co-wrote with Richardson and Šorytė, it is normal for refugees to leave a country where they are persecuted through extralegal means. After all, they cannot simply go to their authorities and ask for permission to travel abroad to escape persecution… It is also normal to move from one country to another to look for better possibilities of obtaining asylum, not to mention that the CAG and other religious movements try to reach as many countries as possible where they can freely worship and preach their religious message.
It is because worshiping and preaching their faith is forbidden in China that they took the painful decision of leaving their country in the first place (often leaving there one or more members of their families). This is part of the normal dynamics of religion-based refugees and has nothing to do with human trafficking.
It is also possible that tax and labor authorities, by evaluating religion-based asylum seekers as if they were ordinary immigrants, do not understand the economy of refugees. They rarely have the resources or the expertise to set up “normal” businesses. CAG refugees, for example, operate studios where they shoot movies they use for their evangelization campaigns, or farms whose aim is not to sell agricultural products but supply food to fellow asylum seekers. While CAG refugees are normally law-abiding citizens, they may not exactly understand tax, labor, or safety regulations in countries very different from China, and finding competent lawyers and consultants takes time. Many of the CAG refugees speak Chinese only and language may be another barrier.
I am certainly not arguing that CAG or other Chinese refugees should be exempted from respecting immigration, tax, and labor laws. What I am advocating for, based both on my studies of the CAG and my experience as the former Representative of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) for combating racism, xenophobia, and religious discrimination, is an approach understanding that religion-based asylum seekers are not economic migrants. How CAG devotees operate after fleeing China should be understood by considering that they are a religious organization whose aim is preaching their version of the Gospel, not a business enterprise, and that they escaped their country not in search of better economic opportunities but because there, as the United Nations said, they are “at risk of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
