A draft international convention aimed against religious restriction in the Soviet Union will be introduced by Morris B. Abram, United States member of the United Nations Subcommission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities at the Subcommission’s 20th session which opens here tomorrow.
Mr. Abram, who is also president of the American Jewish Committee, arrived here today to represent the U.S. at the Subcommission’s deliberations. The draft which he will introduce will be the first substantive item of the Subcommission’s agenda. Mr. Abram was one of the sponsors at the last session of the Subcommission for a draft convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, which is currently before the UN General Assembly.
“The problem of eliminating religious discrimination and intolerance,” Mr. Abram said today, “is more complex than the elimination of racial and ethnic discrimination because it deals with the various manifestations of religion. This includes not only worship, but observance of rituals and customs and the teaching of ideas, not just by individuals in private but also in community with other people.”
If the Subcommission adopts the draft convention, it will have to submit it to the UN Commission on Human Rights by March 1965. It will then go to the UN Economic and Social Council, which in turn will pass it to the General Assembly.
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