Lack of a Global Baseline for Religious Freedom: A Call for a Comprehensive USCIRF Review

Economic Sanctions Are a Tool, Not a Policy

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has made significant strides in highlighting religious freedom as a core priority in U.S. foreign policy. A recent USCIRF report, embedded at the end of this post, discusses some tools used to implement the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) of 1998. This law has played a crucial role in galvanizing international attention to this fundamental human right.

The primary purpose of the USCIRF report, Revisiting the CPC Designation: Improving Accountability and Engaging Productively to Advance Religious Freedom Abroad, is to evaluate the effectiveness of the Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) designation process in advancing religious freedom globally.

The report reviews the history of CPC designations over the past 25 years, assessing how well the designation mechanism has been used, and examines whether the actions (such as sanctions or diplomatic engagement) taken in response to religious freedom violations have produced tangible improvement.

In this post, I am focusing on a subset of all of this: the economic sanctions, but before that, the scope of the great work done by USCIRF. A critical gap remains in the lack of a global baseline for assessing religious freedom. Currently, the U.S. focuses on several countries—often referred to as developing nations, a somewhat outdated term—when evaluating religious freedom.

There are 195 countries worldwide (193 UN member states and two observer states: the Holy See and Palestine). If USCIRF reviews approximately 25 to 30 nations annually, that accounts for about 13% to 15% of the world’s countries. The USCIRF and the State Department both produce reports focusing on a select number of countries, particularly those where religious freedom violations are most severe or of significant concern to U.S. foreign policy.

However, these reports do not provide a global, all-encompassing review of every nation’s religious freedom situation. This approach, or the lack of a baseline that anyone can access for study and planning, creates glaring omissions and can skew assessments of the effectiveness of economic sanctions and lists such as the CPC.