Is the Foreign Office failing persecuted Christians?

After a nineteenth-century British explorer found Christians living near the ruins of Nineveh in what is now Iraq, members of their community petitioned Queen Victoria for protection and aid. The then-Archbishop of Canterbury believed these Christians were descended from the Assyrians of the Old Testament, and enthusiastically set up a mission to help them.

At that time, Western nations were squabbling over Middle Eastern minorities for political and religious gain: one Anglican missionary later described these Christians as “our smallest ally”. Britain made use of them in both world wars and promised them independent territory – which it never delivered, leaving them to defend themselves from their compatriots’ allegations of being fifth-columnists, which still haunt their troubled and much-diminished community today. After the First World War, the acting Civil Commissioner for Mesopotamia, Arnold Wilson, accused Britain of “playing cat’s paw” with the region’s Christians.

Helping beleaguered religious groups is a sensitive issue: it can increase antagonism towards those a benefactor hoped to protect by supporting one community and not its neighbours.

Which may explain why the Government these days shies away from diagnosing situations in sectarian terms – the Foreign Office website mentions Rohingya being expelled from Burma, not Muslims being expelled from a Buddhist country, and of ‘people’ displaced by ISIL, rather than Christians.

The Government counts freedom of religion or belief for all as ‘a key human right’ and ‘a bellwether human right’ – ie. one that signals how much other rights are respected. Yet faith-based charities and supporters of persecuted Christians accuse the Government of being disinterested in their cause.

And this is what has caught the ear of the new Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, who is understood to have a “personal commitment” to the issue. In Boxing Day’s Telegraph, he announced an independent review into the persecution of Christians and what the Government is doing to help them. He added that “a misguided political correctness” must never be allowed to inhibit Britain’s response to religious persecution.

Is the Government disinterested? Some recent events have certainly sent out the wrong messages. In early October, Foreign Office officials declined to meet the family of Asia Bibi, the Pakistani Catholic mother-of-five jailed for blasphemy, during a visit to Britain. And it was the Foreign Office who advised the Home Office not to offer Ms Bibi asylum out of fear of a violent backlash. Yet the ensuing outcry showed great concern that Britain should be doing “the right thing” on this – and should be seen to be doing it.

Two other interventions suggest a frustration that whatever the government is doing, it isn’t enough. Last month the Prince of Wales gave an unprecedented address in Westminster Abbey highlighting religious persecution and praising the resilience of Iraqi Christians who had lost everything to extremist violence. And days later, Foreign Office staff received a personal rebuke from the ex-Tory minister and now-Revd Jonathan Aitken, who, preaching at their carol service, challenged them: “Has this Whitehall Department, like other great Departments of State, gone so far with the fashionable flow of secular political correctness that it marginalises issues related to our Christian roots as a nation?”

Hunt’s announcement also raises a question regarding the efficacy of the role of the religious freedom envoy Lord Ahmad, which may be down to the power structures or budgets in the FCO, or the short time he has been in office. Especially since 2010, the Foreign Office has complained it is under-resourced. Its latest annual Human Rights and Democracy report devotes one page out of 72 to freedom of religion or belief. Its work is not on the same scale as that carried out by counterparts in the US, where for the last 20 years an independent cross-party government commission has made recommendations to the State Department.

(Not that the US approach to the issue requires carbon copying – last week when a Coptic cathedral opened in Egypt on the orders of President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, Trump tweeted his praise for the strongman “moving his country to a more inclusive future!” Sisi, hardly a champion of democracy, provides churches with guards and metal detectors but refuses to address the political and economic drivers that push disaffected Egyptian Muslims towards extremism. Just as Imperial Britain found, it is too easy for Trump or Sisi to use religious freedom as a fig-leaf for divisive politicking. Trump’s earmarking of aid for Iraqi Christians targeted by ISIL sits somewhat awkwardly with his Muslim travel ban.)

One question for the author of the review, Bishop Philip Mounstephen of Truro, is how far he is willing to probe the roots of religious persecution. Doubtless, idealists will call for huge threats to be made to countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt (all three our allies), for their apparent ambivalence to extremism exported from within their borders, but enacting those could cost the UK’s economy and foreign relations dear at this precarious time. More realistic aims would be to tie aid to specific reforms, such as insisting that for Pakistan to receive its £300m-plus UK aid annually, textbooks that denigrate religious minorities be banned – a move for which Lord Ahmad has voiced support.

The review could also call for the flexibility to fund religious charities who mainly help their congregations, while also backing efforts to promote social inclusion and equal citizenship – a move from a faith-blind position to a “faith-sensitive” one. Or to accept that Syrian and Iraqi non-Muslims really are too scared to enter UN camps where they might have registered for asylum. Foreign Office work on freedom of religion could be beefed up with funds from the generous DfID budget. The role of the Home Office is also important: already, one UK-based group, the British Pakistani Christian Association, is calling for the review to include the harassment of converts by extremists in the UK. Existing religious literacy training could be rolled out across all three departments, not just among a few at the FCO.

There is much scope for the Government to strengthen its work safeguarding the rights of all faith minorities, and Christians, who are currently most affected by rising religious intolerance, make a good starting-point. Whether the issue is ambivalence, resourcing or advocacy groups expecting too much too soon, the government needs to both accelerate its work in this area, and be more confident in saying it is doing so.