Last week, Romania's Parliament passed and sent on to the President a controversial new Religion Law. A Forum18 report says that deputies did not have the required five days to consider the report and amended text from the Chamber's Juridical and Human Rights committees before voting on the bill. The text of the bill is available in Romanian on the Parliament's website.
Yesterday, Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-NJ), Chairman and Co-Chairman of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (Helsinki Commission), wrote Romanian President Traian Basecu urging him to return the bill to Parliament for further refinement. (CSCE Release.) Saying that the current draft would be incompatible with Romania's OSCE religious freedom commitments, they continued: "The draft law's shortcomings include the creation of a tiered system of recognition which privileges some religions over others; the establishment of a high numerical threshold that a religious group must surmount in order to receive the most preferential legal status; and the establishment of a 12-year waiting period a religious group must undergo before receiving 'religion' status."
