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Credits for the 2020 edition Editor Emma Wadsworth-Jones Lead Researchers Lillie AshworthMahalet TadesseTommaso Virgili Volunteer researchers Moses AlusalaYusuf BarakaKatarina BranovackiAdriana Buenaventura MartinezGeorgina EdwardsSam EisenkraftJaylyn GallowayKacem El GhazzaliPilar Gianni RodriguezNia HamediGelila KebedeAbigail KendallClare-Marie KohMario KuçiKevin MakovaJessica MarvataMxolisi MasukuSoukaina El MountassirPavlina NaydenovaBishwa P. PandeyFerlin F. PedroKethoseno PeseyieLawrence RickardDominika RozanskaDennis SchutijserEleonora VassanelliLiam WhittonEkaterina […]

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, looking 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, or […]

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). […]