Click on a country from the list below to read the relevant country sections on freedom of religion or belief from these reports:
- The APPG’s Commentary on International Freedom of Religion or Belief
- The FCDO Human Rights and Democracy report
and links to the relevant country sections of The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) 2021 report and the US State Department’s 2020 International Religious Freedom Report, published May 2021. There are also links to Parliamentary references to each country.
The key reports
The APPG has highlighted issues of Freedom of Religion or Belief to inform the FCDO report by publishing a Commentary on International Freedom of Religion or Belief a few months in advance, most recently in March 2021.
The FCDO Human Rights and Democracy report has been published each summer, focusing on the previous year – so the 2020 report was published in July 2021. It includes detailed comments on 31 human rights priority countries: Afghanistan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, Burma, Central African Republic, China, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Libya, Mali, Nicaragua, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Yemen and Zimbabwe.
The USCIRF 2021 report recommends that the State Department:
• Redesignate as “countries of particular concern,” or CPCs the following ten countries: Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan;
• Designate as additional CPCs the following four countries: India, Russia, Syria and Vietnam;
• Recommends that 12 countries are placed on the Special Watch List: Afghanistan, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Cuba, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Turkey and Uzbekistan;
• Redesignate as Entities of Particular Concerns the following seven nonstate actors: al-Shabaab in Somalia, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Syria, the Houthis in Yemen, Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), Jamaat Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM), and the Taliban in Afghanistan.