The U.S. Department of State has released the International Religious Freedom Report 2010.
NEWS.am provides excerpts from the report.
According to the report, the government generally did not enforce existing legal restrictions on religious freedom. There was no change in the status of respect for religious freedom by the government during the reporting period.
There were reports of societal abuses and discrimination based on religious affiliation, belief, or practice.
According to some observers, the general population expressed negative attitudes about all minority religious groups. According to local experts, however, these attitudes did not affect personal and neighborly relationships but rather constituted a general perception of minority religious groups as threats to the state. From July 1, 2009, to June 1, 2010, 35 Jehovah's Witnesses were sentenced to imprisonment for evasion of military or alternative service. Twenty of those sentenced received a 24-month sentence, and the remaining 15 received a 30-month sentence.
According to Jehovah's Witnesses leaders in Yerevan, as of June 1, 2010, 76 of their members remained in prison for refusing to perform military service or alternative labor service on conscientious and religious grounds, and one member remained in pretrial detention. Jehovah's Witnesses representatives stated that all of the prisoners had been given the opportunity to serve an alternative to military service rather than prison time but had refused because they objected to the fact that the military retained administrative control over the alternative service.
Minority religious groups at times continued to be targets of hostile sermons by Armenian Church clerics, and members of minority religious groups experienced societal discrimination and intolerance, including in the workplace.
Various television stations continued to broadcast discussions in which representatives of the Armenian Church and other participants labeled religious minority groups as enemies of the state and national unity.
Throughout the reporting period, a group calling itself the One Nation Party or One Nation Alliance of Organizations continued to circulate leaflets throughout Yerevan denouncing Jehovah's Witnesses. Most of the leaflets warned against "sects," but there were others that called on citizens to "wage a nationwide fight" against them. Following complaints by religious organizations and a warning by the Government Department of Religious Affairs and National Minorities, the group stopped distributing the leaflets. Nonetheless, according to local observers, the leaflets continued to be given out door to door and at subway stations.
Improvements and Positive Developments in Respect for Religious Freedom
On June 14, 2010, the public television station H1, which has nationwide coverage, showed a documentary prepared by Internews NGO on alternative service within a series entitled Parallels: Armenia and Europe. The documentary provided objective and diverse coverage of the topic, including a historical overview of the development of alternative service in Europe; examples of such service in Europe; and interviews with a range of government officials, a representative from the Ombudsman's Office, and other experts, who discussed the law on alternative service, existing gaps, and possible ways to improve it. The documentary also presented interviews with Jehovah's Witnesses imprisoned for draft evasion.
Following requests by the Jehovah's Witnesses, on March 23, 2010, the Ministry of Justice informed the group that the number of allowed visits by Jehovah's Witnesses to their adherents in prison would increase from one every two months to once a month.
Approximately 98 percent of the population is ethnic Armenian. An estimated 90 percent of citizens nominally belong to the Armenian Church. Religious minorities constitute less than 5 percent of the population.
The constitution provides for freedom of religion and the right to practice, choose, or change religious belief; however, the law places some restrictions on the religious freedom of members of minority religious groups.
The constitution recognizes "the exclusive mission of the Armenian Church as a national church in the spiritual life, development of the national culture, and preservation of the national identity of the people of Armenia." The constitution and the Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations establish separation of church and state but grant the Armenian Church official status as the national church.
The 2007 Law on the Relations of the Republic of Armenia and the Armenian Church regulates the special relationship between the state and the Armenian Church and grants certain privileges to the Armenian Church that are not available to other religious groups. It makes the Armenian Church's marriage rite legally binding, but the supporting legal acts to enforce this are not yet in place. The law also allows the Armenian Church to have permanent representatives in hospitals, orphanages, boarding schools, military units, and all places of detention, while the Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations permits other religious organizations to have representatives in these places on demand only. In general the Law on the Relations of the Republic of Armenia and the Armenian Church formally recognizes the moral as well as ethnic role that the Armenian Church plays in society, since most citizens see it as an integral part of national identity and cultural heritage.
Jehovah’s Witnesses in Nagorno-Karabakh reported that they were denied registration last August. In March and April, 2010, Jehovah’s Witnesses were subjected to inspections and arrests, RFE/Radio Liberty reports.
