USCIRF and the Continued Funding of Institutional Failure
This past July, with relatively little fanfare, the House Appropriations Committee passed the FY 2018 State and Foreign Operations Appropriations bill. A small yet important provision within this bill has largely flown under the radar and drawn little discussion or debate in Congress. The specific provision in question appropriates $4.5 million for the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), a governmental advisory body tasked with making policy recommendations on international religious freedom to the President, the Secretary of State, and Congress.
While this seemingly negligible amount of money may appear inconsequential, it will further fund a broken institution that wields disproportionate influence with limited to no accountability or oversight.
USCIRF was created under Title II of the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) of 1998, Section 202(a). Notably, in creating USCIRF, the IRFA implicitly provided extensive discretion to the Commission in conducting its activities without any corresponding meaningful restrictions, definable metrics, or requisite transparency. This is in stark contrast to Title I of the same Act, which requires explicit standards in reporting alleged religious freedom violations, investigative protocols, and training of foreign service officers for the State Department and US diplomatic missions abroad.
Consequently, while USCIRF has been allowed to operate freely without any constraints or quality control, it has simultaneously been vested with the power to influence and help shape our nation’s foreign policy.
A large part of the problem stems from its reliance on faulty source material that forms the basis of its reports and briefs, Congressional testimony, legislative advocacy, and policy recommendations.
As a recent article in Foreign Affairs aptly noted,
An inherent problem with the current system concerns the accuracy of the evidence on which USCIRF bases its conclusions. Because the commission’s mandate is to cover the entire globe, it rarely conducts original research, relying instead on reports from local and international NGOs. It then recycles these reports, without independently verifying their accuracy, and puts the U.S. government’s stamp of approval on them. Worse, the USCIRF provides no specific information on the sources of their data beyond naming NGOs and opposition media. In other words, the reader has no basis for verifying the commission’s data. A further problem with this approach is that many NGOs are highly partisan groups that make no pretense of hiding their agenda, whether it is to actively support a government or to bring it down.
Understandably, one might wonder what the relative impact of USCIRF actually is.
Simply put, the Commission’s actions have significant, and more often than not, negative implications for our foreign policy objectives and frequently undermine bilateral relations with countries as diverse as Vietnam, India, and the Muslim-majority Central Asian republics. In the eyes of these countries, and others, USCIRF is viewed as expressing the official position of the US government, even when it conflicts with existing legislation, agreements, and State Department diplomacy.
For instance, as reported in the same Foreign Policy article referenced above, the Commission recently censured Tajikistan and Kazakhstan for religious freedom violations due to their implementation of reasonable laws and policies aimed at combating radical Islamic extremism and terrorism, thereby undermining our own counterrorism efforts and ties with these countries.
USCIRF’s analysis of religious freedom has similarly been flawed in another vital and increasingly important US strategic ally — India — resulting in reports that have consistently failed to accurately reflect ground realities regarding religious diversity, the legal system, and the status of minorities in the world’s largest democracy.
In these reports, USCIRF has frequently made strong assertions, either relying almost exclusively on agenda driven sources such as the Christian Broadcasting Network, or without citing a single example or reference.
On page 5 of the India chapter in the 2017 report, for example, it claims that “Hindu nationalists often harass Sikhs and pressure them to reject religious practices and beliefs that are distinct to Sikhism, such as wearing Sikh dress and unshorn hair.” This claim, however, is unsubstantiated by any factual evidence, examples of specific incidents, or independently verifiable stories. In fact, Sikhs are prominently visible wearing turbans and unshorn hair across India and at every level of society, including in the highest level positions in the military, government, and entertainment industry.
Similarly, in that same section, USCIRF alleges that “in February 2016 the RSS reportedly placed signs in train stations throughout India that said Christians had to leave India or convert to Hinduism or they will be killed by 2021,” implying that this was a widespread coordinated national campaign. But research into this allegation revealed only one reported incident sourced to the Voice of Martyrs, and that too containing a phone camera picture of one poster.
The regular 2017 report on India was accompanied by a special report released earlier this year, entitled, Constitutional and Legal Challenges Faced by Religious Minorities in India.
Like the annual reports on India, this “special report” also utilized biased one-sided sources and made misleading arguments, omissions, and inaccurate assertions to attack India’s unique brand of secularism and demonize Hindus as aggressors. India’s secular democracy, is by no means perfect, but does go further in protecting minority rights and providing unprecedented accommodations than many Western democracies. One need not look any further than the provision of separate personal laws for Muslims and Christians, the country’s two largest minorities, and other constitutional provisions favoring minority populations.
Its no wonder then that India views USCIRF as meddling in its internal affairs and has consistently denied visas to USCIRF Commissioners for the past several years (by both current and past governments in India).
The questionable merits of the “special report” aside, this time the Commission went so far as to contract a Pakistani-origin activist from an obscure organization in the United Kingdom to write the report.
The author, Iqtidar Karamat Cheema, openly espoused separatist terrorist movements in India (in the states of Punjab and Kashmir) at a rally, and reportedly enjoys institutional links with radical Islamist charities.
Cheema is a Director of the little known “Institute for Learning and Community Development,” which at the time of the USCIRF report was the trade name for a United Kingdom-based charity, Muslim Hands UK (since this connection was first publicly revealed by the Hindu American Foundation during its investigation, it appears steps have been taken to hide the affiliation). Muslim Hands UK has been banned by the Israeli Government for its financial support of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and has also reportedly supported charities affiliated with al Qaeda.
USCIRF’s failure to conduct a background check and adequately vet Cheema recently raised alarm bells for several Members of Congress, many of whom sent a joint letter of inquiry and others who made independent inquiries to the Commission. Despite the concern, however, USCIRF has not been held accountable nor subject to greater Congressional scrutiny or oversight. In fact, it appears that it is back to business as usual for the Commission.
This is reflective of a much broader institutional failure that goes well beyond India or any one particular country, and speaks to the systemic lack of consistent standards and requirements in conducting fact-finding imposed on USCIRF.
Given the repercussions of its work and the influence that it exerts, comprehensive reform to address these issues, whether through legislative amendments or otherwise, are necessary to ensure that it carries out its mandate effectively and credibily.
Until then, we can expect more of the same.
Samir Kalra, Esq. is the Senior Director at the Hindu American Foundation.