Our Violent Incidents Database (VID) is expanding our ability to analyze incident data over time and to produce reliable reports spotlighting urgent situations where innocent people need protection.
One important role of the IIRF is to preserve the rights of all people, whatever their religious affiliation may be. Many targeted religious communities, especially non-Christian communities, have no NGO standing up for them. Accordingly, one of our most recent reports documents the 10 countries with the greatest number of non-Christian victims over a two-year period, from November 2022 to November 2024.
Myanmar dominates the statistics, with over 350,000 Muslims victimized by the country’s military junta. That grim figure dwarfs the 10,200 non-Christian targets in Sudan, which ranks second, followed by Nigeria (where nearly 7,000 Muslims have been among the targets of radical Islamists), China, and India.
The other new VID-based report, authored by Dr. Ronald Boyd-MacMillan, formerly of Global Christian Relief, applies his global knowledge to the VID data to interpret crisis situations in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, India, China, Latin America, and Western nations.
Boyd-MacMillan bemoans media sources’ tendency to pay little attention to the presence of religious persecution, such as when covering Chinese actions against pro-democracy rallies in Hong Kong. He quotes one commentator on this omission as saying, “It’s like going to the Olympics and never mentioning athletics.” But he also finds reasons for hope, such as the obvious sensitivity to human rights criticisms among government officials in China and India.