Luke de Pulford

The Foreign Office’s toothless review into Christian persecution

This week Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt launched his Independent Review into Christian Persecution. Except nothing was actually launched. Nothing published, precious little announced, and it doesn’t look like much has been agreed between Foreign Office officials and the Bishop of Truro, Philip Mounstephen, who Hunt appointed to chair it.

Instead a picture is emerging of a Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) stitch-up.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the Foreign Secretary actually wants to do this. It won’t have been easy to get his new department to go along with the idea, and even harder to make the review independent. But government sponsored reviews are never truly independent. As the Bishop admitted at the non-launch: he is still agreeing ‘terms of reference’ with the Foreign Office. Some independence there.

And therein lies the problem. The FCO – not famed for its advocacy on behalf of persecuted Christians – doesn’t want the review to pack a punch. They want something narrow, cheap, and easy to ignore. How do we know this? Because despite knowing next-to-nothing about what the review is, we have been told a bit about what it isn’t.

And, we are told, the review isn’t going to be cross-departmental. So it won’t involve the Department for International Development or the Home Office. The reviewers will not be able to make any recommendations about either aid spending or asylum – the two critical issues which could actually help persecuted Christians on the ground.

This really matters. DFID’s current policy, reaffirmed only last week is that:

‘It is not possible to disaggregate our spending data by religion…we do not currently have plans to collect data on religion’

In other words they don’t fund groups persecuted for their faith.

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