Religious minorities continue to suffer loss of their rights across the globe, the State Department reported on Monday, with a rise in blasphemy laws and restrictions on faith practices.
Almost half of the world's governments "either abuse religious minorities or did not intervene in cases of societal abuse," said Ambassador-at-Large Suzan Johnson Cook at a State Department briefing on the 2011 International Religious Freedom Report.
"It takes all of us — governments, faith communities, civil society working together to ensure that all people have the right to believe or not to believe," she said.
Christians in Egypt, Tibetan Buddhists in China and Baha'is in Iran are among those without religious rights, the report states.
In Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, people have been killed, imprisoned or detained because they violated or criticized blasphemy laws. In Indonesia, a Christian was sentenced to prison for five years for distributing books that were considered “offensive to Islam.”
These statutes, the U.S. government says, silence people in countries that claim to be “protecting religion.”
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