PROVO — Peru's attorney general visited Brigham Young University 11 years ago and went home with the belief that his country needed a law guaranteeing religious liberties.

The Peruvian Congress is considering the law now and could approve it by the end of the year. The man who chaired the commission that drafted the law celebrated that development Tuesday where it began, at BYU at the annual International Law and Religion Symposium.

"Thanks to this symposium, we will finally have a law outlining religious liberties," University of Lima law professor Guillermo Garcia-Montufar said.

Religious freedom is a major issue around the world — studies show a correlation between freedom of religion and economic prosperity — and became an official factor in U.S. foreign policy 10 years ago this month when Congress unanimously passed the International Religious Freedom Act.

This year's symposium concluded with a critical review of the act's first decade by University of Utah President Michael Young, who helped develop the federal law and spent seven years on the Commission on International Religious Freedom created by the Act.

"I'm not sure it's lived up to all its promise," Young said.

The act created an office on religious freedom within the U.S. State Department with an ambassador at large. The result was a person in every American embassy assigned to study religious freedoms in each nation.

The International Religious Freedom Act also forced the State Department to publish an annual report on the state of religious liberties in every country and what the United States is doing to advance freedom of religion in each.

"That meant there was someone in the State Department who would worry about this issue and only this issue," Young said. "They would form policy recommendations consistent with the values of the United States."

The 2008 report was released last month and included 198 countries and areas. The report is available at www.state.gov and concludes with the belief that the work done by the State Department "brings hope to repressed people around the world."

"In many ways, the report is the single most successful part of the legislation," Young said. "Countries don't want to be singled out by the United States for bad behavior."

Young called on Congress to retool the act to shore up weaknesses evident a decade after passage. Bureaucratic issues inside the State Department have reduced its effectiveness. The commission frequently issues descriptive reports rather than provide policy recommendations.

The annual reports on each country also aren't as effective as they could be, but that is not the fault of the act, Young said.

"The reports draw their power from the credibility of the United States as a critic and from the opprobrium suffered in the international community by those who behave badly," he added. "It's unarguable the United States has had some decline in its capacity to stand as a moral critic ... and the European Union has the capacity to be remarkably feckless if oil and commercial interests are involved. If there isn't that international opprobrium rained on a country when it is not living up to its agreements, the reports aren't as effective as they could be."

The symposium is nonsectarian and policy-conscious. This week's meeting drew more than 60 ministers of religion, religious scholars, judges, lawyers and government officials from nearly 40 countries to consider the state of religious freedom around the world and share their challenges with their peers, said Robert Smith, managing director of BYU's International Center for Law and Religion Studies, which annually makes invitations and sponsors the symposium.

Delegates broke into small sessions based on geography so they could discuss religious freedom challenges in their regions. To improve the dialogue year-round, the center is building a database of the religious freedom laws of every country on its Web site, www.iclrs.org, Smith said.

The group included Jordan's minister of religion and an advocate with the Supreme Court of Pakistan. Some of the other delegates were from Russia, Turkey, Nigeria, Nepal and China.

"The most important benefit of the symposium is meeting people I didn't know and wouldn't meet otherwise," said Huseyin Levent Koker, professor of law and politics at Gazi University in Turkey. "You get a certain stimulus, learn things you can't anywhere else, discover details and new perspectives and leave with new inspiration."

Wherever they came from, there was evidence residents of their countries value religious freedom. The Pew Global Attitudes Survey in 2007 found that 98 percent of Africans found it important to live in a country where they can freely practice their religion. The number was 93 percent in Asia and Latin America, 92 percent in the Middle East and 84 percent in Eastern Europe.

A study by the Hudson Institute found a correlation between religious freedom and economic prosperity and reduced conflict. A study in the 2007 American Sociological Review showed that increased religious competition, implied by religious freedom, lowered religious violence. It also found that members of religious congregations volunteer more with and give more money to both religious and secular charities.

E-mail: twalch@desnews.com