Gender Equality and Religious Freedom: Joining Forces for Peace (5/5)

By Susan Yoshihara

Liberty for women of all religions is an indicator and component of stable and resilient societies. As a previous post in this series of blogs noted, religion is a necessary but often missing component of gender analysis at the sub-national, national, and international level. Including religion can catalyze findings of gender analysis and, conversely, gender analysis can shed light on the cause and effects of religious persecution that otherwise stay in the shadows.

I also noted the way that the double persecution of women for their sex and their religion has compounding adverse effects for stability and resilience of societies. Conversely, promotion of women’s rights and religious freedom have benefits for both agendas. Hence it is past time to integrate religious freedom more fulsomely into WPS efforts and gender into religious freedom initiatives. This last post in this series proposes one way that this can be achieved through coordinating the implementation of two US laws.

Congress can direct agencies implementing the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 (IRFA) and the Women Peace and Security Act of 2017 (WPS Act) to join forces to catalyze both efforts. This has been done with other legislation, such as coordination of WPS with the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act of 2018 and the Global Fragility Act of 2019.

Potential foreign and security policy benefits of collaboration between religious liberty and WPS include:

· Catalyzing each other’s work by closing data and analysis gaps;

· “Seeing” constituencies currently left out of the analysis;

· Identifying the double persecution of women of faith;

· Leveraging more flexible means of reaching people along geographical or issue-based offices in government;

· Bolstering relationships with like-minded allies and partners;

IRFA explicitly seeks coordination with other agenda that “are drawn from the expertise of the national security agencies, the diplomatic services, and other governmental agencies and nongovernmental organizations; and are coordinated across and carried out by the entire range of Federal agencies.” Thus, as a matter of legal intent, WPS and IRFA should be coordinated.

In the IRFA, Congress made it the policy of the United States to stand “for liberty and with the persecuted,” and to “use and implement appropriate tools in the United States foreign policy apparatus” to “promote respect for religious freedom by all governments and peoples.” Liberty for women of all religions is an indicator and component of stable and resilient societies abroad.

The IRFA states that to be effective, U.S. implementation of the Act requires “evolving policies and coordinated diplomatic responses.” This should include the more recent WPS implementation plans and strategic approach now under revision at the Departments of State, Defense, USAID, and Homeland Security. Conversely, the WPS Act’s implementers will find synergy with IRFA, which recognizes that “the promotion of international religious freedom protects human rights, advances democracy abroad, and advances United States interests in stability, security, and development globally.”

The WPS Act directs U.S. foreign policy agencies, including the Defense Department, to “promote the physical safety, economic security, and dignity of women and girls.” The WPS Act was inspired by the UN Security Council’s WPS mandate, which includes ten resolutions adopted since 2000. More than one hundred countries have national action plans to implement the UN WPS framework. Along with protection of women and girls in crisis and conflict, the UN agenda focuses on getting more women to the table during peace negotiations, and many of the most notable cases of success involve women from religious organizations.

In addition to these practical benefits, joining forces more deliberately likely has strategic effects. More than ever, reinforcing human rights and humanitarian values in U.S. foreign policy assures allies and partners of U.S. commitment to the post-World War II human rights framework in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent treaties in which nations identified discrimination on the basis of sex a violation of human rights, and enshrined religious liberty:

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

Both women’s rights and religious freedom, carefully coordinated in US foreign policy, will stand it stark contradistinction to the transactional and bellicose policies of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and thereby bolster the liberal international order these competitors seek to undermine.