Webinar: Advancing Religious Freedom in Different Political Regimes

Webinar Advancing Religious Freedom in Different Political Regimes held on 7 June 2021 to highlight opportunities and successful stories, as well as challenges and failures in promoting religious freedom globally. Each panelist reported on their work in respective political regimes, including Myanmar, Iraq, Turkey, and the work that the International Center for Law and Religion Studies has done with different political regimes.

Brett Scharffs concluded with these remarks: “We have to care for each other in order for us to claim that [human dignity is] universal…. There are ways of advocating that are uniquely Western, but that doesn’t undermine the universality of the values of human dignity. Everyone, everywhere, cares about their own freedoms. These are human values that really are universal even though our models of advocacy can take on cultural characteristics. And sometimes we have to be careful about that.”

Panelists: Brett G. Scharffs, Seng Mai Aung, Ján Figeľ, Mine Yildirim, Knox Thames, Elizabeth Clark.

Moderated by Dmytro Vovk.

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Myanmar: No Religious Liberty in an Unequal Milieu

Farzana Mahmood is an advocate of Bangladesh Supreme Court and one of the co-founders and Executive Director of Bangladesh Manobadhikar O Poribesh Andolon Foundation (BAMAPA), an NGO dedicated to uphold and promote the basic human rights and environment rights of the peoples of the Bangladesh

The conditions of religious minorities in Myanmar especially, Christians (6.2 percent, particularly Chin, Kachin, Karen people), Muslims (4.3 percent, Rohingya, Malay), and Hindus (0.5 percent, mainly Burmese Indians) deteriorated with the military coup in 1962. During the successive five brutal decades following the coup, the military exploited the religious and ethnic diversity of the country and ruled by dividing the communities, pitting Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims against each other.

However, with the onset of civilian governments in 2011, the conditions of the religious and ethnic minorities in the country failed to improve. In 2017, more than 750,000 Rohingya Muslim minorities of the Rakhine state fled Myanmar to Bangladesh when the military started destroying and burning houses, killing Rohingyas, and raping their women.

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