U.S., March 3, 2016 (RNS): A U.S. religious freedom panel says it has been unable to obtain visas for members who planned to travel to India this week to assess conditions there. In its 2015 annual report, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom included India on its list of Tier 2 countries — not the worst offenders but worthy of close monitoring due to religious freedom violations within their borders.
The Tier 2 designation was seen as unfair and part of what Jakob De Roover, a professor at Belgium’s Ghent University, considers an effort by USCIRF to promote a society based on American notions of religion. “It seeks to spread Protestant-Christian values across the world but does so under the guise of promoting and protecting human rights that are ‘universally held sacred,'” he wrote on firstpost.com, an Indian website, shortly after the release of last year’s USCIRF report. [See next report for Roover’s full article.]