International Institute for Religious Freedom

Resources

Providing reliable data on religious freedom is a key priority for the IIRF. We make the following information management resources available:

Violent Incidents Database

The Violent Incidents Database (VID) is a service of the International Institute for Religious Freedom to collect, record and analyze violent incidents concerning violations of religious freedom in all continents around the world.

The VID database, supported by the Observatory of Religious Freedom in Latin America (OLIRE), initially focused on gathering cases from Latin America, compiling incidents from the region dating back to 2002. Additionally, this database benefits from the collaboration of the Observatory of Religious Freedom in Africa (ORFA), specifically in collecting incidents from Nigeria.

Thanks to the support and funding from Global Christian Relief, incident coverage has been expanded globally, covering all five continents, and collecting incidents from 2021 to 2023.

Global Religious Freedom Data Spectrum

The Global Religious Freedom Data Spectrum aims to provide a comparative framework for viewing a wide range of data from organizations’ country rankings on the issues of freedom of religion or belief. By placing the rankings of these diverse organizations in one central place, the Data Spectrum offers users the opportunity to identify a richer, ideologically broader look at each country in the world. The maps below show the data in a compelling way that can help people understand the opportunities and gaps in Global Religious Freedom data.

Religious Freedom Data

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Legal compendium of religious freedom

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Good practices to solve or prevent religious conflicts

The main objective of this project is to identify good practices of prevention and resolution of religious conflicts in different parts of the world that have proven effective and that can be turned into templates that can be adopted by religious groups and relief organizations. In order words, this project aims to document instruments and tactics that have served vulnerable religious communities to avoid or redress discrimination, evaluate their impact, and identify key learnings that can be replicated in other contexts. In this project, any practice will be considered that has proven useful to avert an imminent religious conflict, has allowed to break a pattern of ongoing persecution or has contributed to resolve a lasting conflict.