Religious Rights Vs. Religious Extremism
Karin Esposito, the FPA’s blogger on Religion and Politics and Project Manager for the Tajikistan Dialogue Project in Dushanbe, recently wrote about a new draft law ‘Freedom of Religious Practices and Religious Organizations’ being debated by the Kyrg government. Karin, with the help of an article by Erica Marat, discusses the reasons and possible ramifications of the proposed legislation, which Kyrg’s neighbor Tajikistan is also considering. The law ‘purports to prevent the emergence of totalitarian religious organizations’ by introducing more restrictive registration requirements.
This new proposed law once again brings to the forefront the continual debate between security and individual and group liberties. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan do indeed have a real security threat in radical Islamist groups and individual that threaten not only the state, but also the nation’s and region’s citizens, as I discussed last week the rising number of militants making their way to the Afghan/Pakistan border to join the insurgency from these Central Asian states. But though the governments of Tajik and Kyrg are far from the most repressive in the region, they are still far from democracies and repress their citizens’ rights, including religious. We can only hope that the legislative process in both these states is open to debate from several sectors of society and it has the best interests of all their citizens at heart. The line between trampling on a citizen’s rights and keeping them safe is a continual test of all democracies and governments, those as old as the US and those as young as these CA countries.
Also, from time to time, I will do a post on Karin’s Religion and Politics blog. Here’s my first.