Saudi Arabia, as a nation known to have provided recruits and funding for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, ought to be the prime target of such a policy. In May, the annual report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom revealed: "There are numerous serious reports, which warrant official U.S. government investigation, that Saudis are funding efforts to propagate globally a religious ideology that promotes hate, intolerance, and other human rights violations toward non-Muslims and disfavored Muslims." Michael Young, current chairman of the commission, said the State Department's repeated refusal to list Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, India and Pakistan as countries of concern was "wrong" and not "in the interest of the people in those countries ... [or] the global community."

What's more, the administration has failed to take actions authorized by law to improve the conditions of religiously persecuted people in the countries that were designated as being of "particular concern" in March 2003: Burma, China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Sudan. The IRFA requires the administration to impose one or more of 15 specified penalties on designated countries. The penalties range from an official condemnation to the suspension of security assistance to economic sanctions. Instead, for each of these countries, the administration has invoked a provision in the law that allows the president to waive the requirement if "pre-existing sanctions are adequate." For example, no additional sanctions were imposed on China because of existing restrictions on U.S. exports of crime control and detection equipment to that country.

The Commission on International Religious Freedom calls the reliance on preexisting sanctions "technically correct under the statute" but "unacceptable as a matter of policy." "Reliance on pre-existing sanctions," the commission says, "provides little incentive for [countries] to reduce or end severe violations of religious freedom." According to the commission, "the failure to take additional action under IRFA suggests that nothing further can, or will, be done by the U.S. government to those countries that are deemed the world's worst violators of freedom of religion or belief."

Since 2001, the State Department has also failed to meet the reporting requirements of the IRFA. The law requires the secretary of state to transmit to Congress an annual report by Sept. 1 of each year or the first day after that on which Congress is in session. In 2003, the State Department didn't complete its report until mid-December, and when the report was finally submitted, it was incomplete. According to the Commission on International Religious Freedom, the State Department "has not made public any actions it has taken" regarding countries that violate religious freedom "despite statutory provisions ... that require public dissemination of that information." The State Department has also "not submitted to the Congress the required evaluation of the effectiveness of prior actions."

What explains the administration's failure to take seriously the issue of international religious freedom? Why, after top officials publicly declared it a priority, has the administration failed to meet even the minimum statutory requirements? The extent of its neglect of those requirements suggests that the administration's failure goes beyond incompetence or carelessness. Clearly, despite repeated public statements to the contrary, the administration does not view international religious freedom as a priority.

Robert Seiple, the first U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, attributes the administration's neglect of the issue to "the limited amount of political oxygen in Washington," adding that the neglect is "disappointing to those of us who have been working the issue." It should be disappointing to anyone who values human rights, national security, the rule of law -- and religious liberty. For all the White House's talk about religious freedom and its open appeal to religious constituencies in the election campaign, Bush's record in this area is stunning for its lack of interest, consistency and results.

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