The report also said the Special Representative to Muslim Communities at the US Department of State engaged last October government ministers, religious leaders, and Muslim entrepreneurs on religious freedom and concerns about intolerance in Malaysia.
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“US representatives maintained an active dialogue on religious freedom with government officials and leaders, and representatives of religious groups, including those not officially recognised by the government”, the US Department of State said in its 2014 Report on global Religious Freedom released yesterday. Kerry continued with similarly violent groups: “al-Qaida, al-Shabab, Boko Haram”.
The report said that governments have stood by, “either unwilling or unable to act in response to the resulting death, injuries and displacement”. “Children have been among the victims”.
“The world has learned through very hard experience that religious pluralism encourages and enables contributions from all; while religious discrimination is often the source of conflicts that endanger all”, Kerry said in his remarks during release of the US worldwide Religious Freedom 2014 report.
Saperstein decried blasphemy laws and apostasy laws in countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Sudan.
“We see this dramatized by the plight of countless numbers of prisoners of conscience”, he said, and spoke of his travels to Vietnam, where he “saw firsthand how religious groups are forced to undergo onerous and arbitrary registration process to legally operate”.
Local authorities also pressured religious believers to join state-controlled religious associations and used coercive measures, including confinement and abuse in detention centers, to punish members of unregistered groups, the State Department said.
Government officials frequently withheld permission to build or fix mosques or other places of worship not belonging to the country’s Buddhist majority, the report said, while Buddhists were often favored by “unwritten government policies” for promotion into higher civil service or military ranks.
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The countries now on the CPC list are: Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
