Resources on religious freedom in Europe
The resources relating to religious freedom have a global rather than solely European focus, however it is possible to extract information about Europe without too much effort.
Organisations such as Amnesty International www.amnesty.org, Release International www.releaseinternational.org, Open Doors www.opendoors.org and the Barnabas Fund www.barnabasfund.org monitor religious restrictions and campaign for freedom of religious expression around the world as well as supporting victims of oppression.
Other organisations collate information and comment. The US Department of State website www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/ carries comprehensive Background Notes on every country globally. The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor produce an annual International Religious Freedom Report, available as a pdf from www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/
US based organisation, Freedom House, www.freedomhouse.org/also monitors and analyses trends in freedom and democracy’, producing several annual reports including Freedom in the World, Freedom of the Press, Nations in Transit, and Countries at the Crossroads. While these are not only to do with religious freedom, this issue is alluded to in ‘political rights and civil liberties’ section of the country reports, which include Europe.
Regions of Europe can be compared with each other and against the rest of the world using the Association of Religion Data Archives www.thearda.com – the table below is an example of the kind of information that can be extracted from this data: www.thearda.com/internationalData/index.asp
The 2009 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life report on Global Restrictions on Religion can be downloaded from pewforum.org/Government/Global-Restrictions-on-Religion.aspx. The research attempts to give a comprehensive overview of religious restrictions using data from a wide variety of sources, and some of the European results are used in the Vista article comparing religious freedom and secularity.
Religious Freedom is one of the policy centres of the Hudson Institute crf.hudson.org/. This website carries current news and comment on issues of freedom of religion around the world. Paul Marshall, Senior Fellow of the Institute, writes extensively on religious freedom. Publications include his 2007 report Religious Freedom in the World published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, and his soon-to-be-released book Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide. It is co-authored by Nina Shea, also of the Hudson Institute and published by OUP USA.
Two other reports, though rather dated, are still worth a mention. Boyle and Sheen’s Freedom of Religion and Belief: A World Report gives a comprehensive account of “how the right to hold beliefs is understood, protected or denied throughout the world”. International Perspectives on Freedom and Equality of Religious Belief, edited by Davis and Besier, focuses on how European governments treat religion and analyzes the situation in certain European “hotspots”.
Joanne Appleton