A Federation That Reports on Discrimination Worldwide

Humanists International represents the movement at the United Nations and other international bodies, and its Freedom of Thought Report, an annual publication assessing discrimination against the non-religious in countries around the world, has become one of the federation's most visible ongoing activities, an application of the Amsterdam Declaration's human rights commitments to a specific, sustained documentary project rather than leaving the principle stated but unmonitored. The report's country assessments track laws criminalising blasphemy or apostasy, restrictions on the ability of humanist and atheist organisations to register or operate, and instances of violence or persecution directed at the non-religious, work the federation frames as extending the Amsterdam Declaration's stated principles into an accountability mechanism rather than leaving them as an unexamined statement of values. The Oxford Handbook of Atheism situates this reporting work within a broader shift in organised humanism's twentieth and twenty-first century activity, from primarily philosophical and educational societies toward bodies that also engage directly in human rights advocacy and international monitoring, a shift the federation's own founding congress, chaired by a scientist rather than a philosopher or theologian, arguably anticipated from the movement's earliest institutional moment.