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US State Dept. assesses freedom of religion in Russia

RUSSIAN FOREIGN MINISTRY CALLS US STATE DEPT. REPORT ON FREEDOM OF RELIGIOUS CONFESSION PARTISAN, FACTUALLY DISTORTED DOCUMENT
Portal-credo.ru, 28 October 2009

The Department of Information and Press of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) commented on the annual report of the Department of State of USA on freedom of religious confession in all the countries of the world, "Regions.ru" reports.

"The text of the Russian section of the report corresponds almost verbatim with the version of last year and contains the standard collection of claims against Russia," MID declared.

As posted on the information site, the Russian foreign ministry characterizes the State Department's report as "a document that is politically partisan and that distorts facts."

"Russia is a uniquely multiconfessional state, in which over the course of more than a millennium has guaranteed favorable condition for the coexistence and cooperation of various religions. We understand that representatives of other countries do not always find it easy to comprehend this experience. We will strive to help them with this," MID concluded. (tr. by PDS, posted 30 October 2009)


"ACTUALLY ITS ALL WORSE THAN DESCRIBED IN REPORT
USA reports on believers' problems in Russia
By Andrei Kozenko, Pavel Korobov, Elizaveta Kuznetsova
Kommersant, 29 October 2009

Yesterday the US Department of State published its annual report devoted to freedom of religious confession in the world. Russia was criticized because the religious freedoms established in the constitution in reality are regularly violated. MID of the Russian federation called the report "politically partisan," while the Russian Orthodox church considered that the document is "correct."

The "International Religious Freedom ReportÑ2009" (which has been published since 1998) was prepared by the Bureau on Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor of the USA Department of State. It is devoted to the matter of how religious freedoms are being observed in a majority of the countries of the world. Regarding Russia the report says: "The constitution guarantees the equality of all religions before the law; however the government does not always respect these guarantees." All violations are divided into four categories: problems with registration of religious organizations, access to places of worship, complications with visas for foreign religious personnel, and harassment of religious organizations and individuals.

The authors note that in the past year in the Russian federation there have been established cases "of the negative attitude of the public toward ethnic Muslim groups," attacks on synagogues in various regions of the country, "hostility toward representatives of the Roman Catholic church and also toward other non-Orthodox Christian minorities." The document says that many religious groups have faced difficulties in getting permits for construction of churches. For example, representatives of Muslim confessions have complained that in Moscow province Muslims have only 20 parishes while the Russian Orthodox church (RPTs) has 1,300, protestants, 320, and Baptists, 60.

The report does not contain attacks directed against the Russian government, although yesterday the Russian foreign ministry sharply criticized the document. The report by MID said:  "One gets the impression that the authors decided not to trouble themselves with the establishment of factual information. The text of the Russian section of the report corresponds almost verbatim with the version of last year and contains the standard collection of claims against Russia. Such an approach forces us to repeat the often made assessment of a US Department of State report as a document that is politically partisan and that distorts facts."

It is remarkable that RPTs does not agree with this assessment. "Over the course of a number of years, there has been observed in the reports of the Department of State progress in the accuracy of attitudes toward Russian judicial and public reality. The document rather accurately describes the system of relations between the state and religious associations that has developed in Russia," the head of the synodal Department for Relations of Church and Society, Vsevolod Chaplin, said.

"Positive achievements" also were seen in the report by the co-chairman of the Council of Muftis in Russia, Nafigulla Ashirov.

"Actually it's all worse than described in the report. We are accused of extremism and we suffer pressure from the special services. We see a tendency toward a return to the time of USSR, when believers were imprisoned for religious convictions," an official representative of the administrative center of the Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia, Yaroslav Sivulsky, disagreed with them. (In Moscow the activity of this organization is banned.) "In our country, religious liberty has become worse," Anatoly Pchelintsev, co-chairman of the rights defense organization Slavic Legal Center, thinks. "There are cases of harassment of a number of protestant churches, people in uniform have disrupted worship services and checked the passports of believers. Such a thing did not even happen in soviet times." (tr. by PDS, posted 30 October 2009)

Russian original posted on site of "Portal-credo.ru," 29 October 2009.


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