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While the Online Edition contains all country chapters, we also make available a “Key Countries” edition to download. This may be useful if you particularly want to read the introductory material in PDF form, or to print copies locally. The Key Countries Edition contains only a small number of select countries. We do not […]

If you are interested in joining one of our quarterly training sessions in how to research and update the Freedom of Thought Report, you can sign up here (clicking on this link will direct you to the events page of Humanists International). If you are in the process of updating […]

To mark the annual publication of its Key Countries Edition, Humanists International holds a launch event. Below you can find details of launch events from each year of the Report. 2025 On 30 January, the American Humanist Association hosted the international launch of the 2024 Key Countries Edition. Guest speakers […]

Following a revision to our editorial policy in 2022, it has now been agreed that each year, one fifth of all countries across the globe are reviewed as part of a rolling cycle of updates. The following are countries that have not been updated in this year’s cycle, but that […]

We only plan to conduct a full review of each country entry every five years, based on the rolling schedule outlined below. Every country entry clearly indicates when it was last updated at the top left hand side. Outside of this schedule we will generally not make edits or changes […]

Below you can download the two ranked lists of all countries featured in the Report as at October 2020, when the 2020 edition of the Freedom of Thought Report was finalized for publication. The ranking index is an extension of our Ratings System. The base score for each country is […]

Below you can download the two ranked lists of all countries featured in the Report as at October 2019, when the 2019 edition of the Freedom of Thought Report is published. The ranking index is an extension of our Ratings System. The base score for each country is calculated by […]

Today we are launching the seventh annual edition of The Freedom of Thought Report. This website is the “Online Edition” of the Report. It contains the most up to date entries for every country in the world. Use the map on the front of this site or visit the Country Index to […]

Boundary condition changes in 2019 Angola Added information on Catholic influences with serious human rights concerns. Applied level-4 condition: “Systemic religious privilege results in significant social discrimination”. Therefore removed the superceded null condition in the “Society” strand. Botswana Added interview and testimony on social situation. Applied level-2 condition: “Localised or […]

The following are two ranked lists of all countries featured in the Report as at October 2018, when the 2018 edition of the Freedom of Thought Report is published. The ranking index is an extension of our Ratings System. The base score for each country is calculated by adding how […]

Editorial Introduction to the 2019 edition By Bob Churchill Bob Churchill is Editor of the Freedom of Thought Report and Director of Communications and Campaigns at Humanists International The push to abolish ‘blasphemy’ laws is proceeding apace in many western countries. This is a trend that must be welcomed as […]

Preface to the 2024 edition By Andrew Copson Andrew Copson is the President of Humanists International The freedoms of expression, thought, conscience, and belief are the foundations upon which our humanist ideals are built. They are the measure of an open, modern, democratic society. They are also legal human rights, […]

Foreword to the 2024 edition By Leena Manimekalai, award-winning Indian poet and filmmaker ‘A Trial by Fire’ In December 2021, when I received word that my submission to the i am…project’s call for proposals1“Landing page”, iamstory.org, accessed 4 November 2024, https://iamstory.org/#Landing_page had been selected as part of Toronto Metropolitan University’s […]

EMBARGOED FOR 5 DECEMBER 2017 – 00:01 (GMT) This page is not navigable from the site menu and is only made available for press contacts prior to the launch of the Report. A preview of The Freedom of Thought Report 2017 “Key Countries” edition is available for press contacts: > Download the preview […]

Today in Brussels we launched the fifth edition of the Freedom of Thought Report. And in a huge change this year the report is no longer primarily a downloadable PDF. We have been busy building an online system so that each country in the world now has its own individual […]

Credits of the 2024 edition Editor Emma Wadsworth-Jones Associate Editors Elizabeth O’Casey & Céline Grey Contributors Leena Manimekalai Volunteer researchers Jessica Marvatta, Lawrence Rickard, Petra Schmidt, Caitlin Windle, Scott Jacobsen,and our anonymous volunteer contributors Special thanks to the following Humanists International Members and Associates: Association for Republicanism and Secularism, Associação […]

We defer to the United Nations geo-schema1<unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin.htm> in general to list and organize nation states. We endeavor to include all fully independent and sovereign states in the report; while some disputed territories, overseas territories, dependencies, constituent countries, or non-self-governed territories are not included. If there is known information pertinent to a […]

By Bob Churchill Bob Churchill is Director of Communications at the IHEU, and Editor of the Freedom of Thought Report This report records discrimination against the non-religious, from the relatively minor to the most serious. At that most serious end of the scale, we record how numerous states continue to systematically […]

By Andrew Copson Andrew Copson is President of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) Published by the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), the Freedom of Thought Report is now in its fifth annual edition. In 2012, our first edition was an expanded version of a submission by several […]

By Ahmed Shaheed Dr Shaheed is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, as of 1 November 2016. The right to freedom of religion or belief is a right that is frequently misunderstood by its conflation with narrowly defined views on religious freedom. Such narratives often overlook the […]

The Freedom of Thought Report by Humanists International is a unique annual report and online resource which looks at the rights and treatment of humanists, and the non-religious generally, in every country in the world. Specifically, this report looks at how non-religious individuals—whether they call themselves atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers, […]

Humanists International makes all the data on the assessment criteria applied to each country in the Report available for use under the following license. Freedom of Thought Report by Humanists International is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The open data is hosted on Google Drive. The data should be […]

Every country in this report is assessed against a range of “boundary conditions“. The boundary conditions are statements which may or may not apply to each country. Each boundary condition is associated with one of four thematic strands (these are the vertical columns in the table below). Also, each boundary condition is placed at […]

The Preface by Rafida Bonya Ahmed, to the 2015 edition of the Freedom of Thought Report. “My late husband, Avijit Roy, was a science author, a blogger, a writer on topics including the origins of the whole Universe, homosexuality, the evolution of love and everything including literary criticism in between. […]

As the 2015 edition our the IHEU Freedom of Thought Report documents, persecution of the non-religious has escalated in the past year. There has been a rise in extrajudicial violence, and in several states harsher judicial sentences have been handed down for crimes such as “blasphemy” and “apostasy” (leaving religion). […]

In 2014 the preface to the Freedom of Thought Report is by Aggie Ojera and Gulalai Ismail. They shared a stage at this year’s World Humanist Congress in Oxford, in a truly inspiring plenary session about advocating humanist values in hostile environments. They both work for organizations doing tremendous work advocating human rights, […]

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 […]

If you want to volunteer to help produce the next edition of the report, please complete this application form or read about opportunities to volunteer for Humanists International. If you have substantial information for the report please consider making a submission instead. You can email the report authors with information, requests, corrections or new information specifically pertaining to the […]

Roy Brown is an International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) Representative to the UN Geneva. I attended a three-hour seminar on religious liberty and religious minorities recently (10 June 2014) at the United Nations Geneva. The seminar was organised by the International Association for the Defence of Religious Liberty (IADRL) […]

The BBC covered the IHEU Freedom of Thought report this week, as part of a segment on prejudice against atheists in Egypt and around the world. Bob Churchill, editor of the 2013 report, introduces the video below. I was pleased to take part in a discussion on BBC World’s Impact […]

There’s a round-up of coverage and responses to our Freedom of Thought report over at IHEU.org. This included a launch-day presentation of the report to the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs by the Dutch Humanist Association, Humanistisch Verbond (pictured), at which Dutch Human Rights Ambassador, Lionel Veer, commented, “The Netherlands is committed to supporting […]

The 2013 edition of the Freedom of Thought report is hugely expanded. It now examines every country in the world for legal discrimination and human rights violations which specifically affect atheists, humanists and the non-religious. (The 2012 edition contained 60 countries.) You can download it here. In addition the 2013 edition […]

The following maps colour each country by the level of the most severe boundary condition(s) applied in each category. For example: if the worst boundary condition that is found to apply in the “freedom of expression” category was at the level of “Severe discrimination” then this country will be coloured […]

The International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) Freedom of Thought Report has received welcoming support during parliamentary proceedings of the UK’s House of Commons. Angie Bray MP asked the Minister of State for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) “if he will assess what implications there may be for his policy of the recent report […]

The concept of “blasphemy” remains a huge problem faced by atheists, other non-religious people, and religious minorities around the world. On the one hand, “blasphemy” is simply what you call it when someone is irreverent or insulting about religion. However, the word is deeply entwined with the idea of moral […]

This is an urgent fundraising request for an atheist blogger facing persecution at home. [Update 27 September 2013: You can now contribute at: http://ottawa.humanists.net/defend-freedom-thought] As recorded in the IHEU Freedom of Thought report, we’ve seen an upturn in cases of atheists being persecuted especially for online expressions of their non-religious views. The trend has […]

The IHEU Freedom of Thought report focuses on “discrimination against Humanists, atheists and the non-religious”. But of course, the right to ‘freedom of religion or belief’ applies equally to the religious. So why the focus on non-religious people? As an international umbrella body, the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) […]

The Freedom of Thought Report is a unique worldwide survey of discrimination and persecution against humanists, atheists and the non-religious published by Humanists International. The Report contains an entry for every country in the world.  The Report is updated on a rolling basis by the team at Humanists International, with […]

The International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) is pleased to launch freethoughtreport.com today, 14 August 2013. Freethoughtreport.com is a hub for information and collaboration on the international Freedom of Thought report published by IHEU. The Freedom of Thought report itself, which launched last December to mark Human Rights Day, focuses on […]

The Freedom of Thought Report is published by Humanists International, the worldwide umbrella of Humanist, atheist, secular and similar organizations. The Report examines every country in the world for its record on upholding the rights and equality for non-religious people. We consider issues of legal discrimination and outright persecution and […]

The Freedom of Thought Report is made freely available for use by all on this website. You can read the introductory and interpretive material at: Preface Foreword Ratings System See the Country Index for all country chapters in the Online Edition. In addition we make available a “Key Countries” edition to download. This may […]

If you are an individual experiencing a violation of your right to freedom of religion or belief, or related rights violations for example freedom of expression, then you can make a submission on this site which we may consider for inclusion in the Freedom of Thought report as a case […]

Here you can submit your testimony, data, or expert analysis on freedom of religion or belief violations in a given country. Such submissions must be intended for inclusion in the Freedom of Thought Report. Submissions can be made on this secure external form. The easiest and most efficient way for us […]

Here we provide links and information on various resources related to the Freedom of Thought report. Human rights are important, so the language of rights has become part of common discourse in many areas. Sometimes there is quite loose talk about ‘human rights’ (“I have a right to do whatever […]

An occasional blog specifically on the Freedom of Thought report.

About the map: The map above shows a summary score for each country (this is the average severity of the worst assessment criterion applied across each of four thematic strands) ⬤ Our interactive maps are currently offline and we are working on a replacement ⬤ More maps… About this website: The Freedom […]