Resources

This 31st annual World Report summarizes human rights conditions
in nearly 100 countries and territories worldwide in 2020.
It reflects extensive investigative work that Human Rights Watch
staff conducted during the year, often in close partnership with
domestic human rights activists.

The World Watch List is Open Doors’ annual ranking of the 50 countries where Christians face the most extreme persecution. These free resources will help you stand with your persecuted church family in prayer and action.

Focusing on five-year period of 2014 to 2018, this report provides extensive data and illustrative examples to demonstrate the plethora of ways that governments’ enforcement of blasphemy laws undermines human rights, including freedom of religion or belief and freedom of expression.

Attitudes to faith said to drive negative perceptions more than ethnicity or nationality

State persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses has increased dramatically in recent
years.

This factsheet provides an overview of the UN human rights mechanisms, with a particular focus on those most relevant to freedom of religion or belief.

The Special Rapporteur fully agrees that the right to freedom of religion or belief can never be used to justify violations of the rights of women and girls, and that ‘it can no longer be taboo to demand that women’s rights take priority over intolerant beliefs used to justify gender discrimination’ [as noted by former Special Rapporteur Asma Jahangir]. Acknowledging and rebuking these practices, however, does not mean tacitly accepting an inherent incompatibility between the right to freedom of religion or belief and gender equality. Instead, the two should be understood in a holistic manner as mutually reinforcing human rights norms. Ahmed Shaheed, UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief