Foreign Minister’s Special Representative for Cooperation to Promote Respect for the Right to Freedom of Religion and Foreign Ministry’s Ambassador-at-Large Gennady Askaldovich’s comment on the annual report by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (May 2024)
This year, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom devoted its annual report to the 25th anniversary of the enactment of the International Religious Freedom Act. Convinced as it is in its messianic mission, the United States has long assumed that it knows better than anyone else around the world how to protect religious freedoms and is free to criticise, lecture and control other countries in this regard. Drafted along the same lines, this latest report focuses on a traditional group of undesirable countries, including Russia, which have been subjected to these offensive claims for quite some time now.
Once again, the report sets forth an updated list of facts which allegedly evidence violations of the rights of believers in our country and demonstrate the effort to suppress civil society. Russia stands accused of arbitrarily persecuting Crimean Tatar activists, representatives of the Jehovah’s Witnesses sect, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, etc. Of course, the authors mostly sought guidance from excessively biased and partisan sources sponsored by the United States itself to obtain and interpret this information, including all kinds of foreign agents and undesirable organisations dreaming about defeating and dismembering Russia. They used this information to offer an all-too-common set of recommendations which have been copied from one report to another for many years now.
We would like to emphasise that the report interpreted the facts it presents in an extremely distorted manner, turning them upside down. In all instances when what they refer to as persecution did take place, everything was done according to the law. Some may consider that it is extremely strict or harsh, but this cannot absolve anyone from strictly abiding by it. Confident as they are in their immaculate nature, Americans have no right whatsoever to cover outright extremists.
Russia rejects these allegations and attempts to distort the reality. No one is facing repression for their religious beliefs in our country, and all those who fail to abide by the law get the punishment they deserve.
We advise the American champions of truth and justice to focus on their own country considering the rise in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia there. The United States should refrain from meddling in the domestic affairs of other countries by supporting and sponsoring movements which follow the most dubious and extremist beliefs and creeds, or by creating exclusive puppet clubs akin to the International Religious Freedom or Belief Alliance (IRFBA).
Moreover, it is an open secret that Washington is seeking to incite inter-faith strife in the pursuit of its geopolitical objectives. The United States has played an obvious role in the attempts to split the international Orthodox denomination apart, particularly in Ukraine, where the Canonical Orthodox Church has been subjected to cruel persecution for many years now. It is clear that it is for this reason that the Americans mention the Kiev regime only passingly in their report while shifting all the blame for the lawlessness there on Russia, let alone designating Ukraine under any of the statuses used in the report.
Russia could not care less about being designated on yet another American list. However, we will never fail to respond to an outrageous lack of objectivity and the distortion of facts by these overseas authors, or to expose their bad intentions.
