Joseph DSouza

This week, hundreds of foreign officials, human rights activists and NGO leaders will gather in Washington to discuss what many of us believe is the most pressing issue in the world today: religious liberty. It’s the second annual Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, an initiative the State Department launched last year to address the growing threat against religious liberty across the world. The ministerial is a timely effort: more than seven in 10 people in the world live in countries with high restrictions or hostilities against religion. Having been an advocate for religious liberty for decades, I am encouraged the State Department is prioritizing defending this most basic human right. The ministerial is an opportunity to recalibrate bilateral relations between nations, which for too long have been driven by economic interests at the expense of human rights. For example, despite its long and well-documented history of human rights abuses and curtailment of religious freedom, Saudi Arabia still remains in America’s good graces. I have written before about how the Saudi Kingdom has provided millions of dollars to fund mosques overseas – including in the West – while at the same time denying religious liberty to Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and other faith groups who live in the country. The disastrous conflict in Yemen combined with the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi, an American resident and Washington Post columnist, seems to have finally prodded Congress to put pressure on President Trump to reevaluate America’s relationship with Saudi Arabia. Yet this doesn’t necessarily mean cutting all diplomatic relations or forsaking one of America’s key allies in the Middle East. A viable solution is including international reciprocal religious freedom laws in bilateral relations. A few years ago Rep. Dave Brat, Va., introduced in Congress the Religious Freedom International Reciprocity [...]