Ex-Keston monitors begin news service

Christian Century, April 5, 2003 by Frank Brown

A free Web-based news service began in mid-March to cover freedom-of-conscience issues in Eastern Europe, a region where the editor says conditions are steadily deteriorating.

"I'd say the situation in the former Soviet republics is getting worse in terms of religious freedom," said Felix Corley, the London-based editor of the Forum 18 News Service. "Especially since the late 1990s, we've seen a severe crackdown in almost all the Central Asian countries, along with Belarus."

The news service takes its name--and funding--from a Christian organization in Oslo that is devoted to monitoring compliance with Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It reads in part that every person "has the freedom of thought, conscience and religion."

The Forum 18 News Service fills a void left in December by the Oxford, England-based Keston News Service, which folded with the departure of its director and correspondents. Those correspondents, including Corley and journalists in Moscow, Tashkent and Belgrade, are now the backbone of Forum 18.

In Moscow, at least one religious freedom activist was pleased to hear that monitoring of abuses would continue. "It is extraordinarily important to independently collect information and report on the situation in Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union," said Galina Krylova, a lawyer currently defending Jehovah's Witnesses in Moscow against a government attempt to suppress them.

Publicizing abuses in the West is especially important because "external opinion is often more important" than domestic opinion in pressuring rulers to ease up on religious minorities, noted Krylova, who also has also represented Jesuits and the Unification Church in Russian courts.

Corley said Forum 18 has funding to operate for about two years. After that, plans call for the news service to sustain itself through subscriber donations. "It is a lean operation in the sense that we don't have a grand headquarters. All the correspondents work from their homes," he said, estimating operational costs at about $150,000 a year.

The new service's first report on March 13 came from the mostly Muslim nation of Uzbekistan, where the authoritarian government is refusing to grant legal status to a Presbyterian congregation.