This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Intergovernmental Organization gathers four bodies whose members are states rather than individuals or private groups, each intersecting religion in a different way.
The United Nations supplies the dominant modern international legal language for religious freedom, through its Charter and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose Article 18 guarantees freedom of thought, conscience and religion; its Human Rights Council reports regularly on religious freedom and persecution, and its cultural agency separately maintains heritage lists the atlas draws on for sites and practices. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, founded in 1969 at the first Islamic Summit Conference in response to an arson attack on Al-Aqsa Mosque, describes itself as the collective voice of the Muslim world, coordinating member states on issues including the status of Jerusalem.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, founded in 1998 growing out of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, coordinates Holocaust education and remembrance policy among its member governments and maintains the working definition of antisemitism used widely elsewhere. KAICIID, founded by Austria, Saudi Arabia and Spain under an agreement effective November 2012, with the Holy See as founding observer, is the only intergovernmental body governed by a board drawn from Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, its mandate being dialogue to prevent and resolve conflict.
What the four share is that each was created in direct response to a specific religious or interreligious problem, rather than as a general purpose body that later acquired one.