2014 report out tomorrow

The 2014 edition of the IHEU Freedom of Thought Report will be released tomorrow.

It will be made available for free as a PDF download on this very website, at https://fot.humanists.international/download from Wednesday 10 December 00:01 GMT.

This year we harnessed the power of the humanist community more widely, with volunteer researchers from many parts of the world contributing to an overhaul of the report; most countries have been re-researched and re-written, in many cases from the ground up and wherever possible by people living in those countries, or reaching out to freethinkers in those countries. There was support and input from fully-fledged IHEU member organizations, to atheist Facebook groups and individual humanist bloggers and secularist activists. Huge thanks to all those who made their contribution!

A page from the FOT ’14, featuring a ratings box for Morocco

Another change this year is the way the ratings system is presented. The boundary conditions are separated into “strands” (columns in a ratings table for the country) so it’s easier at a glance to compare countries on different areas of interest, and to see which areas a country does well, or badly on.

This display also helps us to identify gaps in the coverage. This really is an evolving report made with incredibly limited staff time and resources, so IHEU is at pains to point out in the report’s Introduction that there will be omissions, “and the last thing we want to achieve is to make already marginalised non-religious people feel like their problems are being ignored or overlooked because we’ve given the country a better rating than it deserves, or overlooked issues of concern. If you find yourself in this situation, please take it as a prompt to reach out to us and fill us in…” which you can do either by making a submission for the next edition, or by contacting the authors directly.