Human Rights Campaign: the current situation of Freedom of Religion

Continuing with our Human Rights Campaign, this month we will take special attention to the  Article18, Freedom of Religion,  of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that says:

"Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance. "

Nowadays, the situation of the freedom of religion is far from being real and respected by society, getting even worse in the last years due to more and more people repressed by their nations or social groups.

According to the last Pew Research Center report, three-quarters of the world's population lives in countries with "high" or "very high" levels of restriction on religion is observed.

The infringement of this right faces two different situations: the government restrictions on religion from one side, and social hostilities involving religion on the other side. At the first category, according to the study, 27% of the 198 analyzed countries representing a 63% of global population, have governs who impose restrictions on religion against the minorities. At the second category, also a 27% of the countries (73% of population) are counting with "high" or "very high" levels of social hostilities involving religion.

Among the world’s 25 most populous countries, the highest overall levels of restrictions were found in Burma (Myanmar), Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan and Russia. More concretely, China had the highest level of government restrictions in 2013, and India had the highest level of social hostilities involving religion.

Christians and Muslims – who together make up more than half of the global population – faced harassment in the largest number of countries. Christians were harassed in 102 of the 198 countries (52%), while Muslims were harassed in 99 countries (50%).

Finally, in Europe, Jews and Muslims minorities are the highest harassed minorities, where Jews are under this situation in 76% of European countries (25% at world scale), and Muslims in 71% (34% at world scale). In this continent, it's getting usual the presence of organized groups who make use of force or coercion to dominate public life.

For more information visit: http://www.pewforum.org/2015/02/26/religious-hostilities/
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: http://goo.gl/wB6kQg

The poster below is part of a campaign raised during the international project "IntercultuReality " which involved young people from different EU countries in several activities related to Human Rights and its awareness. Realizing that HR are not well known and recognized as it should, they created different posters based on some of the articles of the Declaration, in order to sensitize more people about Human Rights and the current reality. For the following months, we are going to show these posters to support their campaign.
For more information about the project INTERCULTUREALITY visit the blog http://intercultureality.blogspot.it/

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