of Osnabruck, entered into in 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years' War, provided some degree of toleration for Catholics in states which had established Protestant churches and for Protestants in Catholic states. The Treaty of Berlin of 1878 contained provisions requiring the Ottoman Empire and the newly-independent states, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania and Servia, to assure religious freedom to all their nationals. At the end of the First World War, as part of the peace settlement, treaty obligations to respect minority rights, including religious rights, were undertaken (or imposed upon) most of the new states carved out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Turkey and the Balkan states. Several other states, upon admission to the League of Nations, made declarations to the Council of the League that they too would guarantee minority rights. Although there were rudimentary procedures to enforce these obligations, the overall success was not great. Suggestions by Woodrow Wilson and Lord Robert Cecil to include religious protections in the League of Nations Covenant itself were eventually dropped.

At the 1945 San Francisco Conference during which the United Nations Charter was drafted, representatives of a number of small countries--Chile, Cuba, New Zealand, Norway and Panama--argued 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 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 Rights14 and Article 18 of the

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International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and now the Declaration, can best be seen as efforts to give concrete detail to the very general Charter norms.

A recent highly significant recognition of the principle of religious freedom which requires mention is that contained in Principle VII of the Final Act of the 1975 Helsinki Conference on 16 Security and Cooperation in Europe:"

The participating States will respect human rights and
fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought,
conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinc-
tion as to race, sex, language or religion.

They will promote and encourage the effective exercise
of civil, political, economic, social, cultural and
other rights and freedoms all of which derive from the
inherent dignity of the human person and are essential
for his free and full development.

Within this framework the participating States will
recognize and respect the freedom of the individual to
profess and practise, alone or in community with others,
religion or belief acting in accordance with the dic-
tates of his own conscience.

The question of compliance with this obligation has proved to be a highly controversial one at the Belgrade and Madrid followups to Helsinki.17

III. Current Examples of Religious Persecution

In preparing for this testimony, I had thought that I might be able to lay my hands on a comprehensive study of contemporary examples of religious persecution. To my surprise, none of the scholars or Non-governmental Organizations working in this area appear to produce such a study. I did come across a survey of

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religious freedom by the United Presbyterians listing the ten most suppressive and most free nations. Some material can, of course, be gleaned from the annual Amnesty International Report by looking under the entry for each country at what violations took place. 19 Many of them suggest aspects of religious persecution. One can make a similar analysis of the State Department's annual country 20 reports on Human Rights. Neither of these sources really gives a comprehensive picture, although they do hint at a global problem. Some other sources are worth noting to underscore the global nature of persecution: A set of essays published a few years back contains material on religious repression of one sort or another in the Soviet bloc countries, the Arab Middle East and Pakistan as 21 well as interdenominational discrimination in Israel. Jack, the Secretary-General of the World Conference on Religion and Peace, upset a lot of Governments when, using church sources, he named names and gave a number of examples of persecution at the 22 1975 Session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. His examples were:

Dr. Homer

1. The treatment of Muslims in the Southern Philippines

by the central government, a situation giving rise

to a claim of genocide.

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2. The legal and social discrimination practised in

Pakistan against the Ahmadiyas, a non-orthodox Muslim
group in the Islamic state.

3. Discrimination against the 4,000 Jews in Syria who
are said to be forbidden to travel more than 2.5
miles from their homes, prevented from observing

certain religious rites without police permission and
surveillance, and being forbidden to leave the country.
4. The desecration of churches in Cyprus as part of the
"ravages of war" (it appears that desecration of

mosques has also occurred there during the continuing
inter-communal strife).

5. The "systematic religious suppression and discrimina-
tion" against the members of the Coptic Church, a
large minority of ten to twenty percent of the popu-

lation in Egypt.

6. "Current attempts in Africa and elsewhere forcibly to
purge Christian laypersons and clergy of certain

Western aspects of Christianity."

7. Repression of religion in Czechoslovakia by making
it difficult for priests and nuns to organize and
carry on their religious functions.

8. Persecution of Pentecostalists, Jews and Baptists in

the Soviet Union.

9. Threats by President Mobutu in Zaire to close the

Catholic churches for alleged interference in politics. 10. The imprisonment of Christian leaders in the Republic of Korea and of Buddhists in the Republic of Vietnam. 11. Imprisonment of Christian clergy in the Philippines. 12. The successful pressure to silence a Greek Orthodox

priest in Moscow.

I am not sure that much has changed in any of these countries in the almost seven years since Dr. Jack made his list. I might

12-286 083 5

add a few other items gathered at random from my own files. In 1977 this Subcommittee held hearings on Religious Persecution in El Salvador.

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That situation still continues. Indonesia's outrageous invasion and annexation of the former Portuguese Territory of East Timor in 1975-76 brought in its wake cataclysmic events that bore even more heavily on the large Roman Catholic minority than on the rest of that unfortunate population. The InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights, in its report on the Situation of Human Rights in Argentina released in April 1980, devotes considerable space to an examination of the way in which that country has denied "religious freedom and worship" to the Jehovah's Witnesses. A final case that has attracted much recent attention is that of the Baha'is in Iran. Persecution of that group in Iran (and elsewhere) is not an entirely new development. But the pres

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ent Iranian Constitution excludes the Baha'i faith from its list of officially recognized religions, thus depriving the Baha'is of legal protection. In the past year, many of the Baha'i leadership have been arrested and detained without charge, have disappeared, 26 or have been summarily executed.

If these situations were to be examined in depth, I have little doubt that they would demonstrate a pattern of persecution that runs the whole gamut of practices at which the Declaration is directed--from basic denials of life and liberty on religious grounds (which is contrary to the whole spirit and intent of the Declaration) to more subtle discriminations and denials of the specific rights guaranteed by Article VI.