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Global Restrictions on Religion
December
2009
For
more than half a century, the United Nations and numerous international
organizations have affirmed the principle of religious freedom.1 For just as many
decades, journalists and human rights groups have reported on persecution of
minority faiths, outbreaks of sectarian violence and other pressures on
religious individuals and communities in many countries. But until now, there
has been no quantitative study that reviews an extensive number of sources to
measure how governments and private actors infringe on religious beliefs and
practices around the world.
Global
Restrictions on Religion, a new study by the
Some
restrictions result from government actions, policies and laws. Others result
from hostile acts by private individuals, organizations and social groups. The
highest overall levels of restrictions are found in countries such as
Among
all regions, the Middle East-North Africa has the highest government and social
restrictions on religion, while the
The
Pew Forum's study examines the incidence of many specific types of government
and social restrictions on religion around the world. In 75 countries (38%),
for example, national or local governments limit efforts by religious groups or
individuals to persuade others to join their faith. In 178 countries (90%),
religious groups must register with the government for various purposes, and in
117 (59%) the registration requirements resulted in major problems for, or
outright discrimination against, certain faiths.
Public
tensions between religious groups were reported in the vast majority (87%) of
countries in the period studied (mid-2006 through mid-2008). In 126 countries
(64%), these hostilities involved physical violence. In 49 countries (25%),
private individuals or groups used force or the threat of force to compel
adherence to religious norms. Religion-related terrorism caused casualties in
17 countries, nearly one-in-ten (9%) worldwide.
These
are some of the key findings of Global Restrictions on Religion. The study
covers 198 countries and self-administering territories, representing more than
99.5% of the world's population. In preparing this study, the Pew Forum devised
a battery of measures, phrased as questions, to gauge the levels of government
and social restrictions on religion in each country. To answer these questions,
Pew Forum researchers combed through 16 widely cited, publicly available
sources of information, including reports by the U.S. State Department, the
U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the U.N. Special Rapporteur
on Freedom of Religion or Belief, the Council of the European Union, the United
Kingdom's Foreign & Commonwealth Office, Human Rights Watch, the
International Crisis Group, the Hudson Institute and Amnesty International.
(The complete list of sources is available in the Methodology.)
The
researchers involved in this process recorded only factual reports about
government actions, policies and laws, as well as specific incidents of
religious violence or intolerance over the main two-year period covered by this
study, from mid-2006 to mid-2008; they did not rely on the commentaries or
opinions of the sources. (For a more detailed explanation of the coding and
data verification procedures, see the Methodology. For the wording of
the questions, see the Summary
of Results.)
The goal was to devise quantifiable, objective measures that could be combined
into two comprehensive indexes, the Government Restrictions Index and the
Social Hostilities Index. Using the current, two-year average as a baseline,
future editions of the indexes will be able to chart changes and trends over
time.
Global
Restrictions on Religion is part of a larger effort - the Global Religious
Futures Project, jointly funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John
Templeton Foundation - that aims to increase knowledge and understanding of
religion around the world.
Limitations of the Study
It
is important to keep a few caveats in mind when reading this report. First,
because freedom - defined as "the absence of hindrance, restraint,
confinement or repression" - is difficult if not impossible to measure,
the Pew Forum's study instead measures the presence of restrictions of various
kinds. The study tallies publicly reported incidents of religious violence,
intolerance, intimidation and discrimination by governments and private actors.
That is, it focuses on the problems in each country. It does not capture the
other side of the coin: the amount of religious dynamism, diversity and
expression in each country. The indexes of government restrictions and social
hostilities are intended to measure obstacles to the practice of religion. But
they are only part of a bigger picture.
Second,
this study does not attach normative judgments to restrictions on religion.
Every country studied has some restrictions on religion, and there may be
strong public support in particular countries for laws aimed, for example, at
curbing "cult" activity (as in
Finally,
although it is very likely that more restrictions exist than are reported by
the 16 primary sources, taken together the sources are sufficiently
comprehensive to provide a good estimate of the levels of restrictions in
almost all countries. The one major exception is
Download the full report PDF (72 pages, 8MB)
Footnote
1 According to Article 18 of the 1948
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one of the foundational documents of the
U.N., "Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and
religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and
freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to
manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and
observance."
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