USCIRF – Anti-Cult Movement and Religious Regulation Report

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) released a report on regulations of religion and an anti-cult movement ongoing. The Soviet Union era lives with us. Its impact, more precisely, lives on within the lives and communities of today’s Russians because of the impacts on the freedom of religion

As has been reported before, there is a dual-issue implicated here. There is internal repression of the Jehovah’s Witness membership by the Watchtower. While, at the same time, the freedom of religion would stipulate a freedom to practice religion, which the Russian and other governments violate via not respecting this, because of the various forms of legislative restrictions and governmental authorities’ crackdowns on these various groups.

The report from the USCIRF proposes some means by which to combat the violations to the rights of the Jehovah’s Witnesses to practice religion freely. One was recommending that the United States government state “Russia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan as ‘countries of particular concern’ for their ongoing, systematic, and egregious religious freedom violations, and include Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan on its Special Watch List.”

Photo by Alexander Smagin on Unsplash