Religious prisoners in countries afflicted by the coronavirus pandemic are at a “high risk” of contracting the infectious disease and being left to die by the governments oppressing them, United States officials fear.
“In this time of pandemic, religious prisoners should be released,” Ambassador Sam Brownback, the State Department’s point man for international religious freedom issues, told reporters Thursday. “We call on all governments around the world to do so. It’s a good public health move for their nations and it’s morally obviously the right thing to do.”
Brownback’s comments underscored that some of the countries suffering from the most serious coronavirus outbreaks also arrest prisoners of conscience in droves. Yet, the full potential for the coronavirus pandemic to ravage persecuted faith groups remains unclear, given the lack of transparency by rogue regimes.
“Unfortunately, we’re talking millions, and that’s just China,” Brownback said, referring to the mass detention camps that Chinese Communist officials have established to crackdown on Uighur Muslims. “North Korea has a very high number, and we don’t know how many are in their gulag system that they have, and they would be under exceeding exposure to COVID.”
Uighur Muslim activists and other human rights groups have warned that a coronavirus outbreak could spread rapidly through any prison population, given the difficulty of social distancing in any detention. That danger is especially high for victims of religious persecution because authoritarian rulers are often indifferent to the needs of prisoners of conscience, according to Brownback.
“Unfortunately, in some of these prison situations, too, they allow their prisoners to be kept in very crowded, unsanitary conditions and they die there,” he said. “And that’s just allowed by the government rather than being concerned at all for the health and safety of these — of their citizens.”
Brownback pointed to Iran as the scene of a particularly high risk of the virus reaching prisoners, as the country is experiencing one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks outside of China, where the pandemic originated. Iranian officials have released roughly 100,000 prisoners on a temporary basis, drawing a rare compliment from an American official.
“I was pleased to see this — it furloughed some 100,000 prisoners of conscience to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 to this high-risk group,” Brownback said. “But they need to — they have not released a number of high-profile religious prisoners in Iran, and we call on them to release all of them.”
China, Iran, and North Korea have been identified by President Trump’s administration as posing serious challenges to U.S. national security interests. Brownback called for Russia to release the dozens of Jehovah’s Witnesses who have been detained in recent years, along with nearly 200 other “prisoners of conscience” in the country. He didn’t limit himself to rebuking major adversaries, however, as he noted that countries, such as Eritrea and Indonesia, also persecute people based on what they believe.
“These are people that should not be in jail in the first place,” he said. “They are simply in jail for peacefully practicing their faith, and yet various regimes put these peaceful prisoners in jail. This is an important time to pursue this objective of getting them completely released from prisons that they’re in for obvious reasons.”
