@ the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations:

QUESTION: A few weeks ago, a gentleman in Afghanistan was to be tried for his conversion from Islam to Christianity and you were instrumental in securing his freedom and urging for the Universal Declaration of Human Right to be upheld. And my question is: As Afghanistan is a young democracy, do you see this as setting a precedent that may lead the way to wider-spread freedom in that country?

SECRETARY RICE: It’s a really good question and the way that you put it is very important because it is a young democracy. Afghanistan and many of the Muslim countries that are going through democratic transitions are having to deal with one of the most difficult issues that confront any political system, and that’s the relationship between religion and religious law and individual rights and liberties. And we have been through it, although we were founded on separation of church and state; not everybody was founded on separation of church and state. And so it has been a very important evolution as these countries try to deal with this issue.

Now, I do believe that what happened in the Rahman case was a bit of a wake-up call to us and, frankly, to Afghanistan because it immediately brought international expectations into play in Afghanistan for what is understood to be the course of democracy. And I think that was a very good thing. The Afghanistan constitution does have protections for individuals in terms of their religious practice. And so as these countries go through this evolution, I think you’re probably going to have more cases, some of them are going to end up in their courts. You know, we have to remember, again referring to our own experience, that our own evolution was one in which the Constitution has been interpreted time and time and time again as individuals come to the courts and say, you’re violating my constitutional rights. And then we have a case about it and things evolve.

Again, as I said to the lady, we’ve had some pretty awful cases. You know, the Dred Scott decision was a pretty awful decision, and we’ve evolved out of those over time. The same thing will happen in Afghanistan. The same thing will happen in Iraq and there will be decisions that we do not like and that we will have to call to attention the international obligation. I think there will be victories for individual liberties as well. But this is the natural process of democratic evolution and it’s going to take some time. The good news is it’s not the Taliban. Because the Taliban could have carried out that sentence and nobody would have been able to do a thing about it, and that’s what we have to keep in mind. Even when it’s a young, troubled, struggling democracy it’s far better than a dictatorship or an authoritarian regime that does not respect rights nor respects the will of the international community.