October 2010 – Brussels

In a 5 October 2010 speech before the European Parliament in Brussels, Dr. Brian Grim, Senior Researcher, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, addressed the topic “Religious Persecution and Discrimination against Christians and Members of Other Religions.” Reiterating Pew study findings that “nearly 70 percent of the world’s 6.8 billion people live in countries with high restrictions on religion,” Dr. Grim observed that new findings, to be released in an updated Global Restrictions on Religion report, show that “Christians faced governmental and societal harassment in a larger share of the world’s countries than did other religious groups individually.” In fact, “Christians faced some sort of harassment in two-thirds of all countries.”