State Department Purges Religious Freedom Section from Its Human Rights Reports

from What Does The Prayer Really Say? (Fr. John Zuhlsdorf)

Maybe religious liberty is not a human right after all?

From CNS:

State Department Purges Religious Freedom Section from Its Human Rights Reports By Pete Winn June 7, 2012

(CNSNews.com) – The U.S. State Department removed the sections covering religious freedom from the Country Reports on Human Rights that it released on May 24, three months past the statutory deadline Congress set for the release of these reports. [Comment Fr. Z.: Hey! If they don't report on it, I guess it isn't happening, right?]

The new human rights reports–purged of the sections that discuss the status of religious freedom in each of the countries covered–are also the human rights reports that include the period that covered the Arab Spring and its aftermath.

Thus, the reports do not provide in-depth coverage of what has happened to Christians and other religious minorities in predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East that saw the rise of revolutionary movements in 2011 in which Islamist forces played an instrumental role.

For the first time ever, the State Department simply eliminated the section of religious freedom in its reports covering 2011 and instead referred the public to the 2010 International Religious Freedom Report – a full two years behind the times – or to the annual report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which was released last September and covers events in 2010 but not 2011....

Read the whole article here. And please visit Fr. Z.'s blog here.