Recently, some voices within the UK’s Conservative Party, the party of prime minister David Cameron, recommended that there ought to be an ambassador for religious freedom. It’s an interesting idea – and one that might deserve support – but the imperative for it reveals a number of minefields that might defeat its very purpose.
Shortly after the Arab uprisings began, I was invited to speak about pluralism in Egypt at a conference in the US. As part of the conference, the participants listened to a former US diplomat who had served on religious freedom issues. For around an hour, we all listened as he detailed crimes against religious minorities, especially Christians in the Muslim world, and noted abuses in China. Yet he left out the Bosnian genocide against Muslim Bosnians, in the heart of Europe.
These calls for a UK ambassador might result in similar mistakes – to call for an ambassador for religious freedom against a backdrop where we are rightly concerned about the plight of Christians in Iraq and Syria, for example, while we neglect other traumas facing religious communities elsewhere.
If we limit ourselves to the Muslim world, we can see, for example, that there are issues around religious freedom between different types of Muslims in different countries. That includes majority Shia countries like Iran, where Sunnis complain of discrimination, as well as majority Sunni countries like Saudi Arabia, where non-Salafi Sunnis and Shias also feel pressures. That does not include the discrimination suffered by Christian and Muslim Palestinian communities in Israel.
These examples of discrimination do not approach the levels that Christians in Iraq or Syria currently face, but that kind of embattlement does exist for non-Christian minorities elsewhere. Observers can look at, for example, the state of the Rohingya Muslim communities of Myanmar. This situation has been left unattended to for years, and has even been whitewashed by formerly well-respected human rights activists such Aung San Suu Kyi.
Analysts can look further afield at the state of the Uighur Muslim communities in China, which have suffered from religious and ethnic discrimination for even longer. What about the devastation wrought against Muslim communities in the Central African Republic? Would a UK ambassador for religious freedom focus on these cases as well, as he or she should? Unfortunately, the suggestion seems to have arisen to cover only the plight of Christians in Arab and Muslim countries.
If we are serious about religious freedom issues, are we only to look at the developing world? What about within the European continent? Would such an ambassador focus on the religious discrimination cases that come up in the European Court of Human Rights, and which, to the dismay of many human rights organisations, have been resolved poorly?
Would such an ambassador focus on the right of observant and conservative Muslim women to wear the face-veil, if they so choose, when the state oversteps its traditional role and tries to legislate against such a dress code? Would an ambassador for religious freedom be active against the many attempts in Europe to halt the production of kosher and halal meat for Jews and Muslims? Or would the ambassador’s concern only be for communities that exist further afield, in countries with which Britain does not enjoy close economic and political ties?
What about other types of rights issues, when religious issues are interwoven so often with other problems, such as sectarian strife, or ethnic conflict? What happens when religious rights are mixed up, rightly or wrongly, in the midst of discussions over counter-terrorism cases? It is a minefield, indeed.
Nevertheless, there are ways to avert these problems. Firstly, any religious freedom ambassador can expect to be crippled unless he or she receives the full support of the UK’s religious communities. Otherwise, the ambassadorship itself will suffer from controversy from the first day – domestically, before even internationally.
Secondly, any particular policies relating to promoting religious freedom should be part and parcel of any rights approach on any particular state – rather than detached from the broader issues. Otherwise, one set of rights can easily be privileged over others, which means the perception of concern over religious freedom can be misconstrued as selective worry. Rights are rights – and they should be treated as such.
Finally, when particular politicians then push for policies relating to specific religious freedom issues (or, worse, for only certain religious communities), the religious freedom portfolio could become significantly politicised. Certainly, the existing political spectrum in the UK, at least when it comes to international religious freedom issues, is already deeply selective. Any ambassador would need to avoid that pitfall with all of his or her capacity.
Religious freedom is an important right in today’s world, and no less so due to the extremism and radicalism of the likes of the Islamic State – but it is also something that can be very easily abused in the machinations of international politics. One hopes that one day there will be a greater focus on religious freedom from the UK’s shores, However, it must learn from the mistakes of others in that realm, and not be selective in how it views the need to improve and increase the freedom of all to practice their faiths, regardless of where they are.
Dr HA Hellyer is an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, and the Brookings Institution in Washington DC
On Twitter: @hahellyer