International delegates at a conference called for the prevention of Freedom of Religion or Belief (FORB) violations with many pointing toward the human rights abuses being carried out by Pakistan and China, media reports said.
Kurdistan’s Zoroastrian Kurds, Sikhs, Humanists, Christians, Afghan Hazaras, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Chinese amongst many others, together with their religious leaders and civil society grassroots groups from around the world, gathered in London to talk about suffering and persecution.
Notably, the International Ministerial Conference on Freedom of Religion or Belief (FORB) was held from July 5-6 and was organized by the British government following two previous FORB ministerial in Washington DC and one in Warsaw.
The UK became a co-founding member of the International Religious Freedom or Belief Alliance in 2020 and in two years global membership has increased from 27 to 35 countries.
UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, hosting the event, declared “the freedom to believe, to pray, to commit acts of worship or indeed not to believe is a fundamental human freedom and has been since the dawn of time.” Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury called on leaders to “allow freedoms of expression and worship,” without which “other freedoms are lost.”
Death sentences and mob violence against those accused unjustly of blasphemy in Pakistan, torture, rape, and illegal incarceration of millions of western China’s Uyghurs, and suicide bombings carried out on Afghanistan’s Hazara community had the ears of the international community.
Rahima Mahmut, head of the U.K. World Uyghur Congress raised the importance of detecting the beginnings of genocide but regretted his own government’s failure to put into place “adequate mechanisms to prevent genocides from happening over and over again.”
Several side events flagged human rights violations in diverse areas as Eritrea, China, Tibet, Afghanistan and Pakistan. They pointed out the discrimination embedded in Pakistani textbooks whereby Christianity and other non-Muslim faiths were portrayed as inferior.
The event also raised the urgent need to address the persecution of the Hazara in Afghanistan and the imminent risk of genocide against the community.
The groups have recommended the insertion of FORB-specific language into two United Nations General Assembly resolutions that are up for vote again this November, and a recommendation that, “the death penalty can never be imposed as a sanction for non-violent conduct such as apostasy and blasphemy.” It was in context with Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.