The Moon, or supermoon, is seen as it rises behind the U.S. Capitol, Monday, March 9, 2020, in Washington, D.C. A supermoon occurs when the Moon’s orbit is closest (perigee) to Earth. (NASA photo by Joel Kowsky)
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire.]
By Susan Crabtree
Real Clear Wire
When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan this August, defying warnings from both China and the Biden administration against making the trip, one top Taiwanese official was notably absent from the high-profile bilateral meetings and wall-to-wall western media coverage.
You Si-kun, the leader of Taiwan’s top legislative body, was sidelined from the U.S. delegation meetings and events – and it had nothing to do with bowing to Beijing’s demands. Instead, You, one of the most outspoken voices for Taiwan’s independence from China, had a more prosaic reason for his absence: He was at home recovering from COVID.
It was a particularly poorly timed bout with the virus. But the outspoken lawmaker will have another chance to make international headlines and rub elbows with other high-ranking lawmakers and global leaders.
You is scheduled to travel to Washington to headline the first day of the International Religious Freedom Summit, the largest gathering of religious leaders, advocates, and diplomats in the world, to be held Jan. 31 and Feb. 1.
The bipartisan symposium, organized by former Ambassador-at-Large for Religious Freedom Sam Brownback and Katrina Lantos Swett, president of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice, has taken place in the summer for the last two years. This year, Brownback and Lantos Swett decided to move it up several months to coincide with the National Prayer Breakfast, a convocation of members of Congress and religious leaders that usually features an address by the president. The prayer breakfast has been held on the first Thursday of February annually since 1953.
The back-to-back gatherings at the Washington Hilton will feature participants and speakers spanning the ideological spectrum. In addition to numerous U.S. and foreign diplomats, rabbis, imams, Catholic bishops, and evangelical leaders from around the world, expected attendees include outgoing Speaker Pelosi; Rashad Hussain, top adviser to President Biden on religious freedom; as well as this year’s summit’s co-chairs, Rep. Mike McCaul, the incoming House Foreign Affairs chairman; and Sen. Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican.
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You Si-kun is the highest-ranking Taiwanese official the U.S. allows to travel here without complicated restrictions. His visit is viewed as a bookend to Pelosi’s controversial trip to Taipei.
You’s message at the religious freedom summit will undoubtedly rankle Chinese President Xi Jinping and other Communist Party officials. He plans to contrast Taiwan’s democratic institutions and strong laws upholding faith-based freedoms with “the actions of repressive regimes in the Indo-Pacific,” according to the International Religious Freedom summit’s organizers.
Taiwan considers itself a sovereign state, while China views it as a breakaway province, although different Chinese leaders have allowed the island to govern itself since 1949. Xi, however, has vowed to reunify Taiwan with the mainland at some point and has intensified live-fire military exercises in the Taiwan Strait this year, including in the days following Pelosi’s visit.
Washington has long given diplomatic lip service to a “one-China policy,” but is obligated by U.S. law to defend Taiwan militarily against any use of force that would jeopardize the island nation’s security.
In 2019, You helped organize and host a Religious Freedom Forum, a gathering of Indo-Pacific leaders and advocates in Taipei. It was a bold geopolitical move at the time, which came the same year Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, whose party platform favors independence, made a historic visit to the United States over the objections of China.
Taiwanese officials held another religious freedom forum in Taipei this year. At that event, Nury Turkel, who chairs the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom, warned that the Taiwanese people could face a similar fate as the Muslim Uyghurs in western China’s Xinjiang province if Beijing decides to invade the democratic island nation. The Chinese government in recent years has detained more than a million Uyghurs in labor camps with disturbing reports of inhumane treatment. In August, the United Nations human rights office accused China of serious human rights violations that it said “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”
Religious freedom advocates around the world also are concerned about China’s crackdown on civil liberties and religious freedom in Hong Kong. Over the last year, authorities arrested and tried Cardinal Joseph Zen, a much-revered 90-year-old retired Catholic priest who helped organize anti-government protesters in 2019. Zen’s prosecution, along with the arrest and trial of several other pastors and church administrators, is part of a larger effort by Beijing to repress religious minorities and tighten its grip over the once semi-autonomous city.
Taiwanese officials and religious leaders worry they could be next and are seeking to demonstrate even greater solidarity with the U.S.
“The Taiwanese want to highlight the differences in their democratic system from Communist China,” Brownback told RealClearPolitics. “And for a long time, the Chinese held up Hong Kong, saying we let them operate themselves – we’ll let you, Taiwan, operate yourself. But that isn’t happening anymore [in Hong Kong].”
Lantos Swett, daughter of the late Rep. Tom Lantos, a human-rights champion and the only Holocaust survivor to serve in Congress, concurred: “The situation in Hong Kong, the threats to Taiwan, and in a different sense, the suppression in Tibet, and the genocide in Xinjiang all point to an underlying reality — that a dictatorial communist regime, such as the one which rules China is incompatible with genuine human rights, democracy, and religious freedom.”
Over the last two years, the International Religious Freedom Summit has featured a greater focus on condemning China’s religious persecution, which will continue this year. It will also feature forums on several other global flashpoints for religious persecution.
The summit also will include speakers focusing on the ongoing clashes and dissension between the fractured Orthodox Church in Ukraine, which have been exacerbated by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion and war to reclaim the former Soviet territory,
Those forums will examine how Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church and a staunch ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, uses his pulpit and the influence of his church to justify the invasion of Ukraine.
At the last religious freedom summit in June, Moscow’s chief rabbi, Pinchas Goldschmidt, spoke about his decision to leave Russia after experiencing pressure to support Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as ongoing antisemitism in Europe.
Other speakers will address the current state of strict blasphemy laws in several countries around the world. In Nigeria, Sufi musician Yahaya Sharif-Aminu is facing a death sentence for sharing song lyrics that included a religious message on the popular messaging platform WhatsApp. Sharif-Aminu’s lawyers are challenging the constitutionality of the blasphemy law before the country’s Supreme Court, arguing that it violates both Nigeria’s constitution and binding international human rights treaties. His case has the potential to overturn the draconian law, but the outcome – and his life – hang in the balance.
“There’s now a global movement trying to eliminate the death penalty for blasphemy and apostasy – there are a dozen countries that have these laws,” Brownback said. “So, this would be a big case if he can win.”
Another top focus of the summit will be a global campaign to encourage Muslim-majority countries not to deny citizenship to religious minorities. In several Arab countries, non-Muslim members of religious minorities cannot attain citizenship and have faced severe threats, including genocide, in regions controlled by the self-described Islamic State.
But a counter-movement began in 2016 to affirm the rights of religious minorities living in Arab countries. A group of 300 Islamic scholars, politicians, activists, and a small group of interfaith observers gathered in Morocco to advocate for equal citizenship for religious minorities, arguing that such treatment is an Islamic principle prescribed by the Prophet Muhammad.
The Abraham Accords, peace treaties signed in 2020 between the UAE and Israel and the Kingdom of Bahrain and Israel, built on this work, with both sides agreeing to foster “equal citizenship and complete equality of social and political rights” for Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens.
Brownback and Lantos Swett also stressed that the summit will demonstrate how religious freedom issues are at the center of some of the most explosive global conflicts and should help guide U.S. national security policy.
“We are battling against the effort on the part of many people in Washington, D.C., in the State Department and elsewhere who have not entirely sidelined religious freedom but have sort of put it in a corner,” Lantos Swett said. “We believe that it’s central to our human-rights policy, but also to our national security policy as well.”
“When you have regimes, whether it’s the theocracy in Iran or the hidden but not so hidden [religious domination] motivations of Putin, that use their theological convictions to drive their military policy, it always ends badly,” she added. “It underscores how important it is to uphold this idea of freedom of religious conscience and belief.”
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