21 Jan 2014 | Middle East and North Africa, News
A pro-democracy protest in Bahrain, where activists have been jailed for inciting protests through their online activities (Photo: Moh’d Saeed / Demotix)
One hundred and forty characters are all it takes.
Twitter users from Marrakech to Manama know—call for political reforms, joke about a sensitive topic, or expose government abuse and you could end up in jail. Following the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, authorities in Libya and Tunisia unblocked hundreds of websites and dismantled the state surveillance apparatus. But overall, internet freedom in the region has only declined in the three years since the Arab Spring as authoritarian leaders continue to crack down on any and all threats to their ever-tenuous legitimacy.
As the online world has become a fundamental part of Arab and Iranian societies, leaders are waking up to the “dangers” of social media and placing new restrictions on what can be read or posted online. This shift has been most marked in Bahrain, one of the most digitally-connected countries in the world. After a grassroots opposition group took to the streets to demand democratic reforms, authorities detained dozens of users for Twitter and Facebook posts deemed sympathetic to the cause. Similarly, several prominent activists were jailed on charges of inciting protests, belonging to a terrorist organization, or plotting to overthrow the government through their online activities.
Conditions in Egypt—where social media played a fundamental role in mobilising protesters and documenting police brutality—continued to decline over the past year. In only the first six months of Mohammad Morsi’s term, more citizens were prosecuted for “insulting the office of the president” than under Hosni Mubarak’s entire 30-year reign. Cases have now been brought against the same bloggers and activists that were instrumental in rallying the masses to protest against Mubarak (and later Morsi) in Tahrir Square, while countless others were tortured by Muslim Brotherhood thugs or state security forces.
Even in the moderate kingdoms of Morocco and Jordan, state officials are looking to extend their existing controls over newspapers and TV channels to the sphere of online media. Ali Anouzla, a website editor in Morocco, faces terrorism charges in the latest attempt by the state to silence him and his popular online newspaper, Lakome. Access to independent journalism is even worse in Jordan, where over 200 news sites have been blocked for failing to obtain a press license. The government instituted burdensome requirements in a bid to deter any views that counter the state-sponsored narrative.
If governments are beginning to pay attention, it is because online tools for social mobilisation and individual expression are having a profound impact. Social media accounts were set up for every candidate in Iran’s 2013 presidential elections, despite the fact that Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are all blocked within the country. In Saudi Arabia – which now boasts the highest Twitter and YouTube usage per capita of any country in the world – social media has been used to promote campaigns for women’s right to drive, to highlight the mistreatment of migrant workers, and to debate sensitive subjects such as child molestation. Citizen journalism was vital in documenting chemical weapons use in Syria, and a new online platform alerts local residents of incoming scud missiles. Nonetheless, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria rank as some of the least free countries in the world in terms of internet freedom according to Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net study.
Remarkably, the country that has made the most positive strides over the past three years, was once among the most repressive online environments in the region – Tunisia. Protest videos from the town of Sidi Bouzid led to an intense crackdown on online dissidents by the Ben Ali regime. Digital activists even enlisted the help of Anonymous, the hacktivist group, to rally international media attention, provide digital security tools, and bring down government websites. Since then, Tunisian authorities have ceased internet censorship, reformed the regulatory environment, and ceded control of the state-owned internet backbone. Tunisia is now the only country in the region to have joined intergovernmental group the Freedom Online Coalition.
So while the snowball effect of social media contributed to the overthrow of several despots, many of the region’s internet users conversely find themselves in more restrictive online environments than in January 2011. Authoritarian governments now know exactly what the face of revolution looks like and, over the past three years, have shown their commitment to counter the internet’s potential to empower citizens and mobilise opposition. Users in liberal democracies may joke about the insignificance of “liking” a post on Facebook or uploading a video to YouTube, but in a region where your social media activity can make you an enemy of the state, 140 characters can lead to serious repercussions.
This article was posted on 21 January 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
15 Jan 2014 | Europe and Central Asia, European Union, Index Reports, News, Politics and Society
This article is part of a series based on our report, Time to Step Up: The EU and freedom of expression
Beyond its near neighbourhood, the EU works to promote freedom of expression in the wider world. To promote freedom of expression and other human rights, the EU has 30 ongoing human rights dialogues with supranational bodies, but also large economic powers such as China.
The EU and freedom of expression in China
The focus of the EU’s relationship with China has been primarily on economic development and trade cooperation. Within China some commentators believe that the tough public noises made by the institutions of the EU to the Chinese government raising concerns over human rights violations are a cynical ploy so that EU nations can continue to put financial interests first as they invest and develop trade with the country. It is certainly the case that the member states place different levels of importance on human rights in their bilateral relationships with China than they do in their relations with Italy, Portugal, Romania and Latvia. With China, member states are often slow to push the importance of human rights in their dialogue with the country. The institutions of the European Union, on the other hand, have formalised a human rights dialogue with China, albeit with little in the way of tangible results.
The EU has a Strategic Partnership with China. This partnership includes a political dialogue on human rights and freedom of the media on a reciprocal basis.[1] It is difficult to see how effective this dialogue is and whether in its present form it should continue. The EU-China human rights dialogue, now 14 years old, has delivered no tangible results.The EU-China Country Strategic Paper (CSP) 2007-2013 on the European Commission’s strategy, budget and priorities for spending aid in China only refers broadly to “human rights”. Neither human rights nor access to freedom of expression are EU priorities in the latest Multiannual Indicative Programme and no money is allocated to programmes to promote freedom of expression in China. The CSP also contains concerning statements such as the following:
“Despite these restrictions [to human rights], most people in China now enjoy greater freedom than at any other time in the past century, and their opportunities in society have increased in many ways.”[2]
Even though the dialogues have not been effective, the institutions of the EU have become more vocal on human rights violations in China in recent years. For instance, it included human rights defenders, including Ai Weiwei, at the EU Nobel Prize event in Beijing. The Chinese foreign ministry responded by throwing an early New Year’s banquet the same evening to reduce the number of attendees to the EU event. When Ai Weiwei was arrested in 2011, the High Representative for Foreign Affairs Catherine Ashton issued a statement in which she expressed her concerns at the deterioration of the human rights situation in China and called for the unconditional release of all political prisoners detained for exercising their right to freedom of expression.[3] The European Parliament has also recently been vocal in supporting human rights in China. In December 2012, it adopted a resolution in which MEPs denounced the repression of “the exercise of the rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly, press freedom and the right to join a trade union” in China. They criticised new laws that facilitate “the control and censorship of the internet by Chinese authorities”, concluding that “there is therefore no longer any real limit on censorship or persecution”. Broadly, within human rights groups there are concerns that the situation regarding human rights in China is less on the agenda at international bodies such as the Human Rights Council[4] than it should be for a country with nearly 20% of the world’s population, feeding a perception that China seems “untouchable”. In a report on China and the International Human Rights System, Chatham House quotes a senior European diplomat in Geneva, who argues “no one would dare” table a resolution on China at the HRC with another diplomat, adding the Chinese government has “managed to dissuade states from action – now people don’t even raise it”. A small number of diplomats have expressed the view that more should be done to increase the focus on China in the Council, especially given the perceived ineffectiveness of the bilateral human rights dialogues. While EU member states have shied away from direct condemnation of China, they have raised freedom of expression abuses during HRC General Debates.
The Common Foreign and Security Policy and human rights dialogues
The EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) is the agreed foreign policy of the European Union. The Maastricht Treaty of 1993 allowed the EU to develop this policy, which is mandated through Article 21 of the Treaty of the European Union to protect the security of the EU, promote peace, international security and co-operation and to consolidate democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights and fundamental freedom. Unlike most EU policies, the CFSP is subject to unanimous consensus, with majority voting only applying to the implementation of policies already agreed by all member states. As member states still value their own independent foreign policies, the CFSP remains relatively weak, and so a policy that effectively and unanimously protects and promotes rights is at best still a work in progress. The policies that are agreed as part of the Common Foreign and Security Policy therefore be useful in protecting and defending human rights if implemented with support. There are two key parts of the CFSP strategy to promote freedom of expression, the External Action Service guidelines on freedom of expression and the human rights dialogues. The latter has been of variable effectiveness, and so civil society has higher hopes for the effectiveness of the former.
The External Action Service freedom of expression guidelines
As part of its 2012 Action Plan on Human Rights and Democracy, the EU is working on new guidelines for online and offline freedom of expression, due by the end of 2013. These guidelines could provide the basis for more active external policies and perhaps encourage a more strategic approach to the promotion of human rights in light of the criticism made of the human rights dialogues.
The guidelines will be of particular use when the EU makes human rights impact assessments of third countries and in determining conditionality on trade and aid with non-EU states. A draft of the guidelines has been published, but as these guidelines will be a Common Foreign and Security Policy document, there will be no full and open consultation for civil society to comment on the draft. This is unfortunate and somewhat ironic given the guidelines’ focus on free expression. The Council should open this process to wider debate and discussion.
The draft guidelines place too much emphasis on the rights of the media and not enough emphasis on the role of ordinary citizens and their ability to exercise the right to free speech. It is important the guidelines deal with a number of pressing international threats to freedom of expression, including state surveillance, the impact of criminal defamation, restrictions on the registration of associations and public protest and impunity against human right defenders. Although externally facing, the freedom of expression guidelines may also be useful in indirectly establishing benchmarks for internal EU policies. It would clearly undermine the impact of the guidelines on third parties if the domestic policies of EU member states contradict the EU’s external guidelines.
Human rights dialogues
Another one of the key processes for the EU to raise concerns over states’ infringement of the right to freedom of expression as part of the CFSP are the human rights dialogues. The guidelines on the dialogues make explicit reference to the promotion of freedom of expression. The EU runs 30 human rights dialogues across the globe, with the key dialogues taking place in China (as above), Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Georgia and Belarus. It also has a dialogues with the African Union, all enlargement candidate countries (Croatia, the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia and Turkey), as well as consultations with Canada, Japan, New Zealand, the United States and Russia. The dialogue with Iran was suspended in 2006. Beyond this, there are also “local dialogues” at a lower level, with the Heads of EU missions, with Cambodia, Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Israel, Jordan, Laos, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, the Palestinian Authority, Sri Lanka, Tunisia and Vietnam. In November 2008, the Council decided to initiate and enhance the EU human rights dialogues with a number of Latin American countries.
It is argued that because too many of the dialogues are held behind closed doors, with little civil society participation with only low-level EU officials, it has allowed the dialogues to lose their importance as a tool. Others contend that the dialogues allow the leaders of EU member states and Commissioners to silo human rights solely into the dialogues, giving them the opportunity to engage with authoritarian regimes on trade without raising specific human rights objections.
While in China and Central Asia the EU’s human rights dialogues have had little impact, elsewhere the dialogues are more welcome. The EU and Brazil established a Strategic Partnership in 2007. Within this framework, a Joint Action Plan (JAP) covering the period 2012-2014 was endorsed by the EU and Brazil, in which they both committed to “promoting human rights and democracy and upholding international justice”. To this end, Brazil and the EU hold regular human rights consultations that assess the main challenges concerning respect for human rights, democratic principles and the rule of law; advance human rights and democracy policy priorities and identify and coordinate policy positions on relevant issues in international fora. While at present, freedom of expression has not been prioritised as a key human rights challenge in this dialogue, the dialogues are seen by both partners as of mutual benefit. It is notable that in the EU-Brazil dialogue both partners come to the dialogues with different human rights concerns, but as democracies. With criticism of the effectiveness and openness of the dialogues, the EU should look again at how the dialogues fit into the overall strategy of the Union and its member states in the promotion of human rights with third countries and assess whether the dialogues can be improved.
[1] It covers both press freedom for the Chinese media in Europe and also press freedom for European media in China.
[2] China Strategy Paper 2007-2013, Annexes, ‘the political situation’, p. 11
[3] “I urge China to release all of those who have been detained for exercising their universally recognised right to freedom of expression.”
[4] Interview with European diplomat, February 2013.
10 Jan 2014 | Digital Freedom, Europe and Central Asia, European Union, News
(Illustration: Shutterstock)
This article is part of a series based on our report, Time to Step Up: The EU and freedom of expression
The EU has made a number of positive contributions to digital freedom: it plays a positive part in the global debate on internet governance; the EU’s No-Disconnect Strategy, its freedom of expression guidelines and its export controls on surveillance equipment have all be useful contributions to the digital freedom debate, offering practical measures to better protect freedom of expression. Comparatively, some of the EU’s member states are amongst the world’s best for protecting online freedom. The World Wide Web Foundation places Sweden at the top of its 2012 Index of internet growth, utility and impact, with the UK, Finland, Norway and Ireland also in the top 10. Freedom House ranks all EU member states as “free”, and an EU member state, Estonia, ranks number one globally in the organisation’s annual survey, “Freedom in the World”. But these indices merely represent a snapshot of the situation and even those states ranked as free fail to fully uphold their freedom of expression obligations, online as well as offline.
As the recent revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden have exposed, although EU member states may in public be committed to a free and open internet, in secret, national governments have been involved in a significant amount of surveillance that breaches international human rights norms, as well as these governments’ own legal commitments. It is also the case that across the EU, other issues continue to chill freedom of expression, including the removal or takedown of legitimate content.
The EU’s position on digital freedom is analysed in more detail in Index on Censorship’s policy paper “Is the EU heading in the right direction on digital freedom?” The paper points out that the EU still lacks a coherent overarching strategy and set of principles for promoting and defending freedom of expression in the digital sphere.
Surveillance
Recent revelations by former US National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden into the NSA’s PRISM programme have also exposed that mass state surveillance by EU governments is practised within the EU, including in the UK and France.
Mass or blanket surveillance contravenes Article 8 (the right to respect for private and family life) and Article 10 (the right to freedom of expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights. In its jurisprudence, the European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly stated that surveillance, if conducted without adequate judicial oversight and with no effective safeguards against abuse, will never be compatible with the European Convention.[1]
This state surveillance also breaches pledges EU member states have made as part of the EU’s new cybersecurity strategy, which was agreed in February 2013 and addresses mass state surveillance. The Commission stated that cybersecurity is predominantly the responsibility of member states, an approach some have argued gives member states the green light for increased government surveillance. Because the strategy explicitly states that “increased global connectivity should not be accompanied by censorship or mass surveillance”, member states were called upon to address their adherence to this principle at the European Council meeting on 24th October 2013. The Council was asked to address revelations that external government surveillance efforts, such as the US National Security Agency’s Prism programme, undermining EU citizens’ rights to privacy and free expression. While the Council did discuss surveillance, as yet there has been no common EU position on these issues.
At the same time, the EU has also played a role in laying the foundations for increased surveillance of EU citizens. In 2002, the EU e-Privacy Directive introduced the possibility for member states to pass laws mandating the retention of communications data for security purposes. In 2006, the EU amended the e-Privacy Directive by enacting the Data Retention Directive (Directive 2006/24/EC), which obliges member states to require communications providers to retain communications data for a period of between six months and two years, which could result in member states collecting a pool of data without specifying the reasons for such practice. A number of individual member states, including Germany, Romania and the Czech Republic, have consulted the European Convention on Human Rights and their constitutions and have found that the mass retention of individual data through the Data Retention Directive to be illegal.
While some EU member states are accused of colluding in mass population surveillance, others have some of the strongest protections anywhere globally to protect their citizens against surveillance. Two EU member states, Luxembourg and the Czech Republic, require that individuals who are placed under secret surveillance to be notified. Other EU member states have expanded their use of state surveillance, in particular Austria, the UK and Bulgaria. Citizens of Poland are subject to more phone tapping and surveillance than any other citizens in the European Union; the European Commission has claimed the police and secret services accessed as many as 1,300,000 phone bills in 2010 without any oversight either by the courts or the public prosecutor.
Internet governance
At a global level the EU has argued for no top-down state control of internet governance. There are efforts by a number of states including Russia, China and Iran to increase state control of the internet through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The debate on global internet governance came to a head at the Dubai World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) summit at the end of 2012 which brought together 193 member states. At the WCIT, a number of influential emerging democratic powers aligned with a top-down approach with increased state intervention in the governance of the internet. On the other side, EU member states, India and the US argued the internet should remain governed by an open and collaborative multistakeholder approach. The EU’s influence could be seen through the common position adopted by the member states. The European Commission as a non-voting WCIT observer produced a common position for member states that opposed any new treaty on internet governance under the UN’s auspices. The position ruled out any attempts to make the ITU recommendations binding and would only back technology neutral proposals – but made no mention of free expression. The absence of this right is of concern as other rights including privacy (which was mentioned) do not always align with free speech. After negotiations behind closed doors, all 27 EU member states and another 28 countries including the US abstained from signing the final treaty. That states with significant populations and rising influence in their regions did not back the EU and leant towards more top-down control of the internet should be of significant concern for the EU.
Intermediate liability, takedown and filtering
European laws on intermediate liability, takedown and filtering are overly vague in defining what constitutes valid and legitimate takedown requests, which can lead to legal uncertainty for both web operators and users. Removal of content without a court order can be problematic as it places the content host in the position of judge and jury over content and inevitably leads to censorship of free expression by private actors. EU directorate DG MARKT[2] is currently looking into the results of a public consultation into how takedown requests affect freedom of expression, among other issues. It is expected that the directorate will outline a directive or communication on the criteria takedown requests must meet and the evidence threshold required, while also clarifying how “expeditiously” intermediaries must act to avoid liability. A policy that clarifies companies’ legal responsibilities when presented with takedown requests should help better protect online content from takedown where there is no legal basis for the complaint.
The EU must take steps to protect web operators from vexatious claims from individuals over content that is not illegal. Across the EU, the governments of member states are increasingly using takedown requests. Google has seen a doubling of requests from the governments of Germany, Hungary, Poland and Portugal from 2010-2012; a 45% increase from Belgium and double-digit growth in the Netherlands, Spain and the UK. Governments are taking content down for dubious reasons that may infringe Article 10 rights of the ECHR. In 2010, a number of takedown requests were made in response to ‘”government criticism” and four in response to “religious offence”. A significant 8% of takedown requests were in response to defamation offences. With regard to defamation charges, it must be noted that the public interest is not protected equally across all EU countries (see Defamation above).
Although corporate takedown is more prevalent than state takedown, particularly in the number of individual URLs affected, the outcome of the DG MARKT consultation must be to address both vexatious state and corporate takedown requests. The new communication or directive must be clearer than the EU e-Commerce directive has been with respect to the responsibility of member states. While creating a legal framework that was intended to protect internet intermediaries, the EU e-Commerce directive has failed to be entirely effective in a number of high-profile cases. EU member states use filters to prevent the distribution of child pornography with questionable effectiveness. However, filters have not been used by states to block other content after a Court of Justice of the European Union ruling stated EU law did not allow states to require internet service providers to install filtering systems to prevent the illegal distribution of content. The Court made it clear at the time that such filtering would require ISPs to monitor internet traffic, an infringement under EU law. This has granted European citizens strong protections against systematic web filtering on behalf of states. There continue to be legal attempts to force internet intermediaries to block content that is already in the public domain. In a recent case, brought by the Spanish Data Protection authority on behalf of a complainant, the authority demanded that the search engine Google remove results that pointed to an auction note for a reposessed home due to social security debts. The claimant insisted that referring to his past debts infringed on his right to privacy and asked for the search results to be removed. In June 2013, the Advocate General of the European Court of Justice decided Google did not need to comply to the request to block “legal and legitimate information that has entered the public domain” and that it is not required to remove information posted by third parties. Google has estimated that there are 180 cases similar to this one in Spain alone. A final decision in the case is expected before the end of this year, which could have profound implications for intermediate liability.
[1] In Liberty v. UK (58243/00) the ECHR stated: “95. In its case-law on secret measures of surveillance, the Court has developed the following minimum safeguards that should be set out in statute law in order to avoid abuses of power: the nature of the offences which may give rise to an interception order; a definition of the categories of people liable to have their telephones tapped; a limit on the duration of telephone tapping; the procedure to be followed for examining, using and storing the data obtained; the precautions to be taken when communicating the data to other parties; and the circumstances in which recordings may or must be erased or the tapes destroyed”; A. v. France (application no. 14838/89), 23.11.1993: found a violation of Article 8 after a recording was carried out without following a judicial procedure and which had not been ordered by an investigating judge; Drakšas v. Lithuania, 31.07.2012, found a violation of Article 13 (right to an effective remedy) on account of the absence of a judicial review of the applicant’s surveillance after 17 September 2003.
[2] The Internal Market and Services Directorate General
3 Jan 2014 | News, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture
At its core, freedom of religion or belief requires freedom of expression. Both fundamental rights are protected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, yet nearly half of all countries penalize blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion. In 13 countries, atheists can be put to death for their lack of belief.
The U.S. State Department names and shames eight “Countries of Particular Concern” that severely violate religious freedom rights within their borders. These countries not only suppress religious expression, they systematically torture and detain people who cross political and social red lines around faith. The worst of the worst are:
1. Burma
Burma’s population is 90 percent Theravada Buddhist, a faith the government embraces and promotes over Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. Minority populations that adhere to these and other faiths are denied building permits, banned from proselytizing and pressured to convert to the majority faith. Religious groups must register with the government, and Burmese citizens must list their faith on official documents. Burma’s constitution provides for limited religious freedom, but individual laws and government officials actively restrict it. Most at risk in Burma are Rohingya Muslims, 240 of whom were killed this year in clashes with Buddhist mobs. Burma has refused to grant citizenship to 800,000 Rohingya, 240,000 of whom have fled their homes in recent clashes.
2. China
The ruling Chinese Communist Party is officially an atheist organisation. China’s constitution provides for freedom of religious belief, but the government actively restricts any religious expression that could potentially undermine its authority. Only five religious groups — Buddhists, Taoists, Muslims, Catholics and Protestants — can register with the government and legally hold services. Adherents of unregistered faiths and folk religions often worship illegally and in secret. Uighur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners have faced particularly severe repression in recent years, including forced conversion, torture and imprisonment.
3. Eritrea
The Eritrean government only recognizes four religious groups: the Eritrean Orthodox Church, Sunni Islam, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Eritrea. These groups enjoy limited religious freedom while adherents of other faiths face harassment and imprisonment. Religious persecution in Eritrea is generally driven by government rather than social concerns. Jehovah’s Witnesses and other conscientious objectors who refuse to enroll in compulsory military training are subject to physical abuse, detention and hard labour. People of non-recognized religions are barred from congregating in disused houses of worship and have trouble obtaining passports or visas to exit the country.
4. Iran
Iran’s constitution offers some religious freedom rights for recognized sects of Islam along with Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians. Baha’is, who the government considers apostates and labels a “political sect,” are excluded from these limited protections and are systematically discriminated against through gozinesh provisions, which limit their access to employment, education and housing. Evangelical Christians and other faith groups face persecution for violating bans on proselytizing. Religious minorities have been charged in recent years and imprisoned in harsh conditions for committing “enmity against God” and spreading “anti-Islamic propaganda.” Government-controlled media regularly attack Baha’is, Jews and other minority faiths to amplify social hostilities against them.
5. North Korea
North Korea’s constitution guarantees religious freedom, but this right is far from upheld. The state is officially atheist. Author John Sweeney says the country is “seized by a political religion” and that it considers established religious traditions a threat to state unity and control. North Korea allow for government-sponsored Christian and Buddhist religious organizations to operate and build houses of worship, but political analysts suspect this “concession” is for the sake of external propaganda. A Christian group says it dropped 50,000 Bibles over North Korea over the past year. If caught with one, citizens face imprisonment, torture or even death. Given the government’s extreme control over the flow of reliable information, it is difficult to determine the true extent of religious persecution in North Korea.
6. Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia’s constitution is not a standalone document. It is comprised of the Quran and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, which do not include religious freedom guarantees as spelled out in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In Saudi, it is illegal to publicly practice any faith other than the state’s official religion Sunni Islam. Members of other faiths can worship privately, but non-Muslim houses of worship may not be built. The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, otherwise known as Saudi’s morality or religious police, enforce Shariah law on the streets. Apostasy and blasphemy against Sunni Islam can be punished by death, as several high-profile Twitter cases have reminded global media in recent years.
7. Sudan
Sudan’s interim constitution partially protects religious freedom but restricts apostasy, blasphemy and defamation of Islam. Muslim women are also prevented from marrying non-Muslim men. The country’s vaguely worded apostasy law discourages proselytizing of non-Muslim faiths. Christian South Sudanese living in Sudan are subject to harassment and intimidation by government agents and society at large, but untangling the religious and ethnic motivations for this persecution can be difficult. Muslims generally enjoy social, legal and economic privileges denied to the Christian minority population. Government authorities have reportedly destroyed churches in recent years, and Christian groups have reportedly been subject to disproportionate taxes and delays in building new houses of worship. Read more about Sudan’s crackdown on Christians.
8. Uzbekistan
Proselytizing is prohibited in Uzbekistan, and religious groups must undergo a burdensome registration process with the government to enjoy what limited religious freedom is permitted in the country. More than 2,000 religious groups have registered with the government, the vast majority of which are Muslim but also include Jewish, Catholic and other Christian communities. Registered and unregistered groups are sometimes subject to raids, during which holy books have been destroyed. Individuals and groups deemed “extremist,” often for national security concerns rather than specific aspects of their faith, are imprisoned under harsh conditions and tortured, sometimes to death.
