Russian Foreign Ministry says U.S. State Department’s religious freedom report politicized

(Interfax – MOSCOW, May 23, 2013) The 2012 international religious freedom report of the U.S. State department has been done superficially and does not reflect the objective situation, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

“We are to conclude that the U.S. State Department has again presented a contorted and politicized picture of the situation in the religious freedom sphere in the recently released annual international religious freedom report for 2012, having substituted deep analysis of reasons for religious intolerance with superficial accusations against a number of countries, including Russia,” Russian Foreign Ministry’s special envoy on human rights, democracy and supremacy of law Konstantin Dolgov said in a comment posted on the ministry’s website.

Dolgov said that the indisputable progress achieved in preserving and enhancing the inter-religious peace had been ignored in regard to Russia.

The situation in this sphere in the U.S. remained outside the criticism as usual, Dolgov said.

The comment said that according to the report of the Tel Aviv University and the European Jewish Congress on anti-Semitism in the world in 2012 and review of main tendencies, the U.S. is the second in the world on the number of anti-Semitism incidents, 99, recorded in countries with numerous Jewish citizens.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said that other Western countries, pretending to have full implementation of religious freedoms and having received high evaluations in the U.S. State Department’s report, were no better.

U.S. non-governmental organizations are concerned with the conditions of U.S. Muslims, accounting for around 18% populations of the country. Special services and law enforcement authorities of the U.S. are consistently implementing the policy of total control over Muslim communities and certain preachers, up to legalizing out-of-court executions abroad using air drones.

“We suppose that regardless of announced goals, such biased opuses lead to aggravation of inter-religious problems. Not politicized leaflets, but inter-confessional dialog and respected attitude to traditional humanistic values common of all world religions are needed to solve them,” the statement said.