BURMA/MYANMAR: Draft anti-religious conversion law
released
On 27 May 2014 the state media in Burma
(Myanmar) published the latest in a series of
anti-democratic laws for the national legislature to
consider: the Law Relating to Religious Conversion
(Draft).
Like other anti-democratic draft laws brought
through the legislature since the country's shift from
overt to covert military rule, this new draft law
disingenuously denies precisely the rights that it claims to
protect: those concerned with religious freedom. It denies
rights to religious freedom by proposing to establish, at
the local level, boards that will scrutinize the credentials
of any person wanting to change his or her religion. No
formal recognition will be accorded to a change in religion
without someone getting a permit from one of these
boards—which matters greatly in a country where religion
is recorded on all identity documents, and questions of
inheritance are decided with reference to so-called
customary religious law.
Under section 3 of the draft law,
the inquisitorial boards will consist, at the township
level, of the head of religious affairs (chairperson), the
head of the national registration department (deputy
chairperson), the deputy administrator of the township and a
person of his choice, the chairperson of the women's
affairs federation, and a member of the education
department. Under section 7(a) at least four of these
persons form a quorum with which to interrogate someone
seeking to convert her or his religion. Under section 7(b),
the interrogation, to take place within 90 days of an
application, will inquire about the extent to which the
person wanting to convert has grasped the "essence" of
the religion to which she or he wishes to convert; its
cultural practices relating to marriage, divorce and the
separation of property, and inheritance and child custody.
Following this inquisition, the board will either issue or
deny a permit with which to convert.
In short, someone
wanting to change religion in Burma will, if this law is
passed, have to submit herself or himself to an inquisition
by an assortment of government officials, who will
arbitrarily decide whether or not to grant the person
interrogated what amounts to an official permission slip to
change her or his religion.
It goes without saying that
the draft law is designed to prevent Buddhists from
converting to other religions, especially Islam, by creating
such onerous requirements and establishing through a process
of interrogation and intimidation that conversion will be
practically impossible. In particular, it aims to stop
non-Muslim women from marrying Muslims, by preventing them
from converting to Islam before or after marriage. On the
other hand, one cannot imagine much resistance on the part
of these scrutinizing bodies to the conversion of
Christians, Muslims or animists to Buddhism.
On the
pretext of protecting the rights of citizens, this law is a
further step to their withdrawal. In particular, it is on
the pretext of protecting the rights of vulnerable young
(Buddhist) women that this law is being put forward to the
legislature, and we need not think long or hard to recall
other governments in Burma that used exactly the same
pretext in their own programs for the denial of rights: the
military dictatorships from 1988 to 2011 throughout
represented themselves as consisting of benevolent, paternal
statesmen above all concerned for the lives, morality and
chastity of their young, female citizenry. This population
was not allowed to speak, but it was spoken for by these
regimes and their collaborators, just as the boards proposed
under the current law will presume to speak for the
knowledge of persons wanting to convert as to the contents
and character of the religions to which they seek to
convert. Even more than patriotism, the claim to be
protecting the rights of vulnerable young (Buddhist) women
is in Burma the refuge of the scoundrel.
The Asian Human
Rights Commission calls for the strongest opposition to this
law in Burma, both in the public domain, and in the
legislature. It calls for this opposition not only as a
matter of concern for the rights of minority religions and
the rights of people who want to convert to them, but also
as a matter of concern for every person in Burma, since the
denials of rights to some groups precipitate the denial of
the same to the whole, and since this latest draft law is
only the latest in a series of highly regressive,
anti-democratic laws to come to Burma's legislature,
speaking to a trend not towards further democratisation, as
some ill-informed and naïve observers have claimed, but in
the opposite direction, towards the entrenchment of
authoritarianism, albeit in more diverse and less explicit
forms than in earlier periods.
The AHRC also calls for
strong opposition to the law among civil society groups and
those concerned with religious freedoms throughout the
region, and in international agencies. Although to the
outside world the government of Burma will present this law,
like laws on protests and farmland before it, as a new
development in building a modern and progressive society,
the purpose of this technique is to conceal precisely the
opposite type of law from view: one aimed at keeping Burma
stuck in its past, rather than moving towards a new and
better
future.
Ends
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