religious rights abuses in Eritrea, especially against evangelical Christians and youngsters.
"Eritrea could do much more to guarantee regious freedom," said the report written by Dutch human rights investigators.
The authors Cees Flinterman, of Universitity Utrecht’s Netherlands Institute for Humanrights, Jan ter Laak, of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, and Forough Nayeri, an independent ntroplogist, visited the Horn of Africa nation to investigate reports of persecition this summer. They concluded that “political dissidents” most of them Christians, are jailed in "horrible circumstances."
At least 1750 Christians have been detained in shipping containers, military labor camps and other inappropiate facilities, the investigators wrote. A recent list of prisoners, which was reportedly smuggled out of Eritrea, suggested the number may be higher and that nearly 2,000 people, including also some Muslims and Jehova Witnesses, are imprisoned in Eritrea because of ther faith.
The report authors said however that most of those imprisoned are evangelical Christians as well as people working on “renewal” movements within the official churches. In addittion young people are at being targetted by the government “because they want change,” and often refuse to join the military.
MILITARY DRAFT
"In the eyes of the authorities the military draft and suffering are irreplaceable elements of the Eritrean character," the investigators said in a statement obtained by BosNewsLife.
Since May 2002, the Eritrean government banned all independent religious groups not under the umbrella of the Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran or Muslim confessions. Eritrea’s President government has enied human rights abuses saying that no groups or persons are persecuted in the country for their beliefs or religion.
The report, handed over to the Parliamentary Comission for Foreign Affairs in The Hague comes amid growing pressure on the Dutch government to better protect Christian refugees seeking asylum in the Netherlands, as at least some of them, risk imprisonment, torture and even execution when they return home.
The Netherlands was long seen as a traditional European safe haven for people persecuted for their faith or political ideas, but the influx of immigrants and the rise of Islamic extremism in the country has led to new tensions in the small nation, Dutch commentators have said.
