UN experts urge scrapping Myanmar’s proposed Religion Laws

A team of United Nations experts last week added their weight to growing calls for Myanmar’s government to scrap proposed contentious legislation that would restrict religious freedoms.  In a joint statement released June 20, three UN experts on freedom of religion, minority issues and human rights in Myanmar, formerly Burma, maintained that the draft bill made religious conversion more difficult and that sanctions on offenders of the law were “disproportionate.”  They warned that the laws were “vague and subject to interpretation that may lead to discrimination against religious and ethnic minorities or the poor,” adding, “this process appears partial to the interest of one particular group and simply propagates the spread of incitement of racial and religious hatred, which the Government must do more to address.” 

Rita Izsák, the UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues, warned that the laws threatened minority rights.  Myanmar’s President, U Thein Sein and the speaker of the national assembly, U Thura Shwe Mann, have already endorsed the draft laws and instructed government ministries to ratify them following a process of ‘public consideration’ before presenting the legislation to parliament.  Heiner Bielefeldt, the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, said that the government had no place interfering with someone’s private religious affairs and that laws which did so were “illegitimate and incompatible with international human rights standards.”  The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Burma, Yanghee Lee, said he was worried that Burma was now “backtracking” on human rights and democratic values, citing the arbitrary arrest of journalists and activists “deemed anti-establishment” in recent months. The independent experts, who are not UN staff and not paid for their work, are appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to report back on a specific country or human rights theme.