The 2026 religious freedom report focuses on major global violators, but its most unsettling message for Europe is that intolerance, harassment, and state pressure are already much closer to home than many assume.
The new 2026 Annual Report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom is, first of all, a global alarm bell. It examines conditions in 29 countries during 2025 and tracks the many ways freedom of religion or belief is being violated: through extremist violence, authoritarian lawmaking, criminal prosecutions, prison abuse, surveillance, forced conformity, and discrimination against minorities that are seen as inconvenient or suspect. Much of the report focuses on countries where persecution is severe and systematic, including places such as Afghanistan, China, Iran, Russia, and Nigeria. Yet one of the most important lessons of the document is that religious freedom is not only threatened in faraway war zones or openly repressive states. Europe, too, appears in the report as a region where legal protections coexist uneasily with hate crimes, harassment, and, in some cases, troubling forms of state interference.
That is what makes the report more than a diplomatic inventory. It is also a warning about how religious freedom erodes. Sometimes it happens through brutal mass violence. Sometimes it happens through quieter tools: registration laws, zoning rules, “transparency” measures, state pressure on clergy, confiscation of religious materials, or the use of national security language against unpopular groups. The report’s broader argument is that freedom of religion or belief is rarely the only right at stake. When governments or institutions begin deciding which communities are respectable enough to be protected, and which can be watched, restricted, or isolated, the issue rapidly becomes one of equal citizenship, rule of law, and democratic credibility.
The report’s global frame is especially forceful because it links religious freedom to wider instability. USCIRF argues that mass atrocities, conflict, forced displacement, and the weakening of civil society often travel together with attacks on religion or belief. It also criticizes the shrinking of some international protection mechanisms, including cuts to rights-related funding and tighter refugee and asylum policies. In that sense, the document is not just describing persecution as a moral concern; it is describing it as an early indicator of broader institutional failure. When believers, converts, dissidents, nonbelievers, or small religious minorities are no longer secure, other rights tend to weaken as well.
Germany appears in the report as a warning sign
Germany is not portrayed in the USCIRF report as a state that systematically discriminates against religious minorities. But it is very much present in the report as a country where serious religiously linked hostility is part of the current European landscape. The starkest example is the killing of 26-year-old Rahma Ayat, a Muslim Algerian nursing student in Hannover, who was stabbed to death after months of harassment about her hijab. The report places her killing within a wider pattern of anti-Muslim sentiment that continued to threaten lives in Europe.
The German references do not end there. USCIRF also notes that police in Germany investigated bomb threats affecting mosques, synagogues, and churches. That detail matters because it shows how religious insecurity in Europe is not confined to one community. Muslims, Jews, and Christians all appear in the report as potential targets of hostility, intimidation, or desecration. Germany therefore emerges in the document not as a primary violator on the scale of authoritarian states, but as proof that even countries with strong institutions can face a dangerous climate in which faith identity becomes a trigger for violence, threats, or exclusion.
Hungary and the Scientology case
One of the report’s most significant European references concerns Hungary and the Church of Scientology. In its chapter on broader global developments, USCIRF notes that religious communities in Hungary raised concerns about a proposed bill on the “Transparency of Public Life,” which would create an “anti-money laundering” body with sweeping access to private data and internal records of organizations deemed to threaten Hungarian sovereignty. According to the report, religious communities feared the law could be used against groups the government regards as threatening.
That concern becomes more concrete in the report’s specific reference to Scientology. USCIRF notes that UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief Nazila Ghanea expressed concern that the Hungarian government had targeted the Church of Scientology through raids, denial of occupancy certificates, and the seizure of confidential religious files. Even in the short space devoted to the issue, the significance is unmistakable. This is not a passing dispute over paperwork. It is presented as an example of how administrative and legal tools can be used in ways that burden a minority religious community and raise wider religious-freedom concerns.
Additional background helps explain why that passage deserves more attention than its brief wording might suggest. As previously detailed by The European Times in its reporting on the Scientology case in Hungary, the dispute stretches back years and includes the 2017 raids on Scientology churches and missions, the repeated denial of an occupancy certificate for the Church’s Budapest headquarters, and the seizure of confidential pastoral files. That earlier reporting also recalled concerns raised by UN special procedures in 2018 about discriminatory measures and interference with places of worship. Whatever one’s opinion of Scientology as a religion, the principle at issue is larger than any one movement: once a government can selectively weaponize privacy law, tax enforcement, property controls, or security narratives against an unpopular minority, the protection of religious freedom becomes fragile for everyone.
State pressure takes different forms across Europe
Hungary is not the only European country in the report where direct government pressure raises concerns. In Armenia, USCIRF says Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s statements about the Armenian Apostolic Church raised concern over possible interference in the Church’s religious autonomy. The report says he proposed establishing and personally appointing a council to elect a new church leader and that his attacks on Catholicos Karekin II coincided with the arrest of clerics and lay figures who had criticized or politically opposed the government. USCIRF also notes that whether those arrests were justified or religiously motivated remains debated. Even so, the report clearly presents Armenia as a case where the line between politics and religious autonomy has become worryingly blurred.
Belarus appears in a different but also revealing way. USCIRF says that in April the authorities banned and labeled as “extremist” NGOs that documented religious freedom abuses. One of the so-called “organizations,” the report adds, was in fact a single Catholic priest active on social media. This detail may sound almost absurd, but it is precisely why it matters. It shows how states can suppress religious-freedom monitoring itself, turning documentation and public testimony into something treated as suspect or extremist.
Turkey is one of the clearest European or near-European examples in the report of structural pressure on multiple minorities at once. USCIRF says demographic and political trends have contributed to increased state-sponsored and social marginalization of non-Sunni Muslims. It specifically points to the situation of Alevis and Ja’fari Shi’a Muslims, while also describing continuing barriers faced by Christians. Eastern Orthodox believers still await the reopening of the Halki School decades after government policies led to its closure, leaving Christian communities dependent on clergy training abroad. The report also says Christian, Alevi, Shi’a Muslim, and secularist parents continue to face a lack of real religious choice in education, as public schools require most pupils to take religion courses. In addition, it describes how state policies and identity documentation practices can lead Alevis, atheists, Protestant Christians, converts from Islam, and others to be misidentified as Sunni Muslims and subjected to compulsory Islamic instruction. The same chapter notes that Turkey has used immigration and national security codes against foreign Christian clergy and other religious workers, while Protestant Christians and Jehovah’s Witnesses face further obstacles in securing legal recognition and access to houses of worship.
Azerbaijan is another important case. In its main chapter, USCIRF describes an ongoing crackdown on independent civil society that has reduced credible reporting on religious-freedom abuses, including the detention of Shi’a Muslim activists and retaliation against those reporting on such cases. The report also notes concern in Washington over Azerbaijan’s destruction of Armenian religious heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh. An individual dissent included in the report goes further, arguing that Azerbaijan should be treated even more harshly because Shi’a religious actors have faced beatings and abusive detention conditions, while Armenian Christian prisoners from Nagorno-Karabakh reportedly suffered severe mistreatment, including denial of Bibles. Even allowing for the fact that this stronger language appears in a dissenting section, the overall picture remains one of serious pressure on both Shi’a religious life and Armenian Christian heritage.
Russia, meanwhile, is presented as one of the world’s major violators, and the report’s treatment of it has major European relevance. USCIRF says Russian authorities continue to criminalize peaceful religious activity by branding groups “extremist,” “undesirable,” or “terrorist” without credible evidence of violence. The report lists a broad range of communities affected, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims such as Crimean Tatars and other groups accused of links to banned Islamic movements, Falun Gong practitioners, Protestants, and Scientologists. It also notes that Russia recognizes only a narrow set of “traditional” religions and views independent communities that refuse alignment with the state as threats to national security. In practical terms, that means prison terms, harassment, censorship, forced labor, and pressure on religious leaders who dissent from state policy. For Europe, Russia remains a reminder of how quickly a government can turn religious diversity into a security problem and then institutionalize repression under the language of law.
A wider European climate of hostility
Beyond direct state pressure, the report documents a wider European climate in which attacks on people, clergy, and houses of worship continue to spread. USCIRF says police in France investigated attacks on rabbis during the year. It reports arson attacks on churches in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom, as well as investigations into arson attacks on mosques in East Sussex and in Piera, Spain. In Ukraine, police arrested a man accused of setting fire to the Sadigura synagogue. The report also describes attacks using human waste against churches in Germany, Italy, and the Vatican, as well as desecration of at least five Jewish sites in London, including synagogues.
What emerges from these examples is not a single ideological pattern but a broad atmosphere of vulnerability. Jews are targeted. Muslims are targeted. Christians are targeted. Smaller communities can be targeted either by open hatred or by quieter administrative hostility. The report’s European material therefore pushes back against a simplistic narrative in which the continent’s religious-freedom problem is only about one faith or one minority. It is about whether states and societies are willing to defend equal dignity consistently, even when fear, political opportunism, or social prejudice make selective protection seem easier.
To its credit, the report does not ignore positive steps. It notes, for example, that Italy unveiled a national plan to combat antisemitism, that the United Kingdom opened debate on defining anti-Muslim hatred while safeguarding freedom of expression, and that Sweden, Switzerland, and Denmark announced or adopted measures to combat antisemitism. These developments matter because they show that public institutions can still respond constructively. But the report also warns that good declarations are not enough if the underlying climate of hostility, impunity, or discriminatory policy remains unresolved.
Why the European sections matter
The great value of the USCIRF report is that it refuses to treat freedom of religion or belief as a niche issue affecting only faraway believers in headline-grabbing crises. It shows instead that this freedom is a stress test for democratic seriousness. In Europe, the pattern is often less dramatic than in countries ravaged by war or ruled by theocracy, but it is no less important. A Muslim woman harassed until she is killed in Germany, a minority church placed under administrative pressure in Hungary, Catholic religious-freedom documentation labeled “extremist” in Belarus, church autonomy drawn into political struggle in Armenia, Alevis and Christians constrained by state systems in Turkey, Armenian heritage and Shi’a believers under pressure in Azerbaijan, and nontraditional communities criminalized in Russia all form part of the same larger story.
That story is not that Europe has lost religious freedom. It is that Europe cannot afford complacency about it. The report makes plain that religious liberty does not disappear only when constitutions are rewritten or dictators openly outlaw a faith. It can also erode through hostile rhetoric, selective bureaucracy, politicized enforcement, weakened safeguards, and the idea that unpopular minorities deserve less protection than established majorities. That is why the Scientology reference in Hungary matters, why Germany’s violence matters, and why the report’s broader European warnings deserve to be read carefully. The health of religious freedom is measured not by how confidently governments protect the popular and familiar, but by how fairly they treat the marginal, the controversial, and the vulnerable.