Thursday, December 10, 2020

Blasphemy Laws Around the World

Yesterday the USCIRF released a report on blasphemy laws around the world.  Read the summary of the report here.  The summary page also has a nice map showing how the countries with blasphemy laws are distributed around the world.  For those who are interested, you can read the full pdf report here.

The summary page lists several key findings.  A few of them are:

  • 84 countries currently have blasphemy laws.
  • From 2014-2018 there were 732 reported blasphemy cases, and 674 of them were considered criminal blasphemy.
  • Most of the cases are in the Asia-Pacific and Middle East regions, with over 80% of the state-enforced cases were in just ten countries.  Pakistan had the most (over 175), but others in order starting with the most cases were Iran, Russia, India, Egypt, Indonesia, Yemen, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait.
  • Over half of the accused were Muslims (56%), and the other accused came from various groups, including Christians (25%), Atheists (7%), Baha'is (7%), and Hindus (3%).

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