This winter break Sangdoo Shin and I, Hadi Mufid, students at Handong International Law School (HILS) were given a great opportunity to work on Mongolian Religious Freedom project, particularly, Registration Limitation of Religious Organization, and Mongolian Visa Issuance for Religious Workers. We worked with a team of three other students from HILS. The project required an extensive amount of research, but overall, it was a great exposure to understanding how life is uneasy for religious workers is in Mongolia, a country that is not famous for religious restrictions.
We researched the law related to registration limitations for churches or other religious organizations in both the international legal system and other nations’ legal systems, especially focusing on the registration limitations related to time period restrictions. For this, we specifically researched:
- The UN Convention on Religious Freedom as a Human Right
- Treaties that have Mongolia is a member,
- UN Declaration on Minorities: Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities
- Provisions from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
- The latest on Mongolian religious freedom demography, and
- Status of Mongolian Government Respect for Religious Freedom.
For the second part of the project, the team was assigned to specifically research laws on Visa Issuance for religious workers in the international and other nations’ legal systems because in
Mongolia it has turned into a major obstacle: the Mongolian government issues religious visas to foreign missionaries, but the government has increased the annual visa fee to 5,000,000 tugriks (approx. $2,500 annually) primarily to prevent foreign missionaries from coming into Mongolia.
For this part of the project, we researched the laws of strict and liberal countries on visa issuance for religious workers to compare with that of Mongolia. These countries include Saudi Arabia, Russia, People’s Republic of China, and Laos for the restrict nations, and Philippines, the U.S., South Korea, United Kingdom and Germany for the liberal countries. In the process we learned that there is one thing in common between Mongolia and those strict countries: restrictions are not explicitly included in their laws, the behavior of the authorities towards the religious workers seems to be the main problem. In other words, the number of individuals/groups who suppress religious activities is increasing, yet the government is not taking an action to grant religious groups full protection.
We found the relevant laws from the mentioned UN treaties, and national laws, and submitted it to the Mongolian Parliament Member (MP) who is going to use them to propose an amendment to the Mongolian legislature to amend laws relating to religious freedom.
We hope that the Mongolian MP would find our work helpful, and that the Mongolian government pays special attention to grant religious freedom, as a basic human right to the nation of Mongolia, as well as full protection for the religious workers on the ground.