Atheists face persecution worldwide, report says

The “Freedom of Thought Report”, which is published annually on International Human Rights Day on Dec. 10, said the past year had been marked by a surge in the number of officials and political leaders agitating against non-religious people “in terms that would normally be associated with hate speech”.

This had been widespread in Muslim countries, where activists attracted to non-religious philosophy had been prominent in the “Arab Spring” unrest, it said.

A Saudi law on terror enacted in January banned “calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion,” the report said, while Turkey’s president, Tayyip Erdogan, had also equated atheism with terror.