In my written statement, I analyze the particular details of the declaration. I don't wish in my oral presentation to go through each of its provisions. However, I would like to mention some highlights of it, particularly article I and article VI. Article I, Mr. Chairman, makes it clear that freedom to have a religion includes freedom to manifest one's religious beliefs. It is one thing to say that, in the solitude of one's own mind, there is freedom of belief; it is quite another, and I suggest a much more important thing, to acknowlege a right to act out the tenets of one's belief, particularly in the company of others. I have in mind the kind of activities later listed in article VI of the declaration-freedom to worship with others, to engage in religious practices, to learn and to teach and to have some kinds of religious organizations. Such rights are not absolute in any legal system or under the declaration. They may, according to article I, be subject "to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health or morals, or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others." Reasonable people can differ about where such lines of limitation are to be drawn. And one cannot always expect good-faith linedrawing in this area in domestic or international forums. But the basic statement of the right to manifest one's religion in article I and the specifics later in article VI are of crucial significance. Article VI is the most detailed provision of the declaration. It contains a list of various manifestations of religion or belief which are protected, subject to demands of public safety and the like referred to in article I. It includes the rights of worship and assembly, the right to have an appropriate organizational structure, at least for charitable and humanitarian purposes, and to have communications-although not necessarily organic links-with likeminded persons and groups at the national and international level. Article VI(c) guarantees the right to "make, to acquire and to use" the "articles and materials" related to the rites or customs of religion or belief. This matter of obtaining religious paraphernalia is of great significance to, for example, Jewish groups in the Soviet Union. I commend the other provisions of the declaration to your scrutiny. I cannot underestimate the importance of this document, the drafting of which proved so time consuming and painful to the international community. Second, Mr. Chairman, I turn to a little history. It is important to recall how recent the development of the right to religious freedom is at both the national and international level, a matter already adverted to by Dr. Gordon. At the national level, for example, it was not until after the French Revolution that Jews and Protestants in France had full freedom to practice their religion on the same basis as Catholics. In England, there were various kinds of civil and political disabilities on Protestants not members of the established church, and on Catholics and Jews, well into the 19th century. Religious freedom was by no means the norm throughout colonial America. There were, of course, shining exceptions like Pennsylvania. The broad principle that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise there of," was guaranteed by the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1791, but its details are still being worked out by the courts. At the international level, there have been sporadic references to religious freedom since the 1500's in various international documents. At the 1945 San Francisco Conference, during which the U.N. Charter was drafted, representatives of a number of small countries-Chile, Cuba, New Zealand, Norway, and Panamaargued strenuously for the inclusion in the Charter of precise and detailed provisions relating to the freedom of thought, conscience and religion. Their efforts were unavailing. The U.N. Charter merely refers in a general way in article 1, paragraph 3, and in article 55, to the promotion "of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion." The only slightly less general language in article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and now the much more detailed provisions of the declaration, can best be seen as efforts to give concrete detail to the very general norms in the U.N. Charter. Finally, Mr. Chairman, there is the subject of current examples of religious persecution. In preparing for this testimony, I thought that I might be able to lay my hands on a comprehensive study of contemporary examples or religious persecution. To my surprise, none of the scholars of nongovernmental organizations like Dr. Gordon's working in this area appears to have produced such a study. I did come across a survey of religious freedom by the United Presbyterians, which I will give to the staff, listing the 10 most suppressive and the 10 most free nations. I must confess that I have always been somewhat skeptical about lists of the 10 most something or other. And certainly this list contains some surprising inclusions and omissions. But it is interesting nonetheless. [The information follows:] F In Many Places It's Still Dangerous to Believe A.D. survey of religious freedom lists most oppressive and most free nations or the past eight months A.D.'s editors have been accumulating data on the state of religious freedom around the world. Sources have included personnel and publications of human-rights monitoring agencies like Amnesty International, the United Nations, citizens of more than 50 nations, newspapers, magazines and press services, refugees, and official representatives of many countries. A.D.'s conclusions: The free exercise of religion is limited, to at least a degree, almost everywhere. Faithfulness to a religion can upon occasion carry heavy price tags of discrimination, pain, imprisonment and death. ● Matters of religious freedom, seen in the long view, are looking up, not down. Early in the A.D. investigation it became clear that evaluation of the degree of religious freedom enjoyed in a given country requires much more than the asking of the first question: Are believers free to meet for worship? In theory if not always in practice, people everywhere are free to engage in worship, the fundamental practice of faitheven in communist states-except in Albania and North Korea and, for some sects and religions, in such hard-line Muslim nations as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. To determine actual degrees of religious freedom we found ourselves forced to ask further questions: May a religious group hold title to property? Is proselytizing permissible? Must a sect obtain a licence or registration certificate? Can a religious group publish freely? Operate schools? Are its leaders able to travel freely in pursuit of the business of their religion? Are the children of believers given equal opportunity to education and jobs? (See graph on page 28). A second set of questions was devised to test the degree of religious freedom possessed by individuals. Among the questions: May a person freely change his or her religion? (No, in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and elsewhere). Is the practice of religion a negative factor in gaining admission to university training or securing a good job? (Yes, in most communist states). And so on. Yet, even where all such questions have been answered, another question is necessary: How violent has been the state's response to challenges posed by a religion to law or custom? The answer to that question, for example, catapults Argentina-by no means particularly repressive in legislation or enforcement against the ordinary exercises of religion-into first rank as a repressive regime because of state-sponsored murder and kidnapping of members of the social-activist wing of the Christian churches that have occurred in recent years. Finally, and even more subjectively, shifts and changes in the restrictive practices of some nations signal movement toward religious freedom; other shifts signal steps away from the same. Two examples make the point clear. A traditional tax levied in Muslim states upon non-Muslims, the jizya, was originally an ordinance by which early Muslim rulers extended the right of residence in their dominions to Jews and Christians, an unheard-of liberality for the era. Today, the necessity to pay any tax for the support of activities of a religion that is not one's own is normally viewed as oppression. To institute the exaction of the jizya in Pakistan, as is now under discussion in that country, would clearly be a step away from religious freedom. To waive payment of the jizya in a nation like Saudi Arabia, where it historically has been collected, is a move in the opposite direction. Similarly, in a country like the Soviet Union, where it has been impossible for more than 50 years for a church to remit money to persons outside the country, a new privilege to remit modest sums overseas, albeit under intense governmental scrutiny, may be a step toward freedom; the recent imposition by the United States government of procedures for scrutinizing remittances of large sums by churches (and all others), heretofore unknown in this country, could become a step backward. Repression 'n many nations comes down, in the end, to a quarrel betv een state and religion over what constitutes faith and its proper exercise. In Uruguay, for example, the state and its secret police have determined clearly that no religionist may question the basic economic structures of society. In South Korea, the never-to-be-asked religious questions concern the morality or immorality of the socalled Yushin constitution. Similarly, in communist states, religionists are never to question the moral basis upon which communist parties exert a dictatorship of the proletariat. None of these divergences of understanding about what constitutes an act of faith have been allowed for in this 12-286 O - 83-4 study. Our definition of the practice of religion, applied to all countries, is as follows: Religion is that which one believes and acts upon in obedience to understandings or impulses presumed by a community to be transcendant in origin. The definition makes room for Bahais, Jews and Muslims in their varieties of sects, the thousand "denominations" and religious societies of Christendom, animists of Africa, Indonesia and hill-country India, Buddhists, Shintoists, Hindus, and even-to the extent that history can be viewed as transcendant-those old foes of religion, the Marxists. In this connection, though the Marxists come through on A.D.'s chart as great oppressors of religion everywhere but in Cuba and Nicaragua, A.D. found itself asking what its chart might have looked like if we had treated communism as a reli |