State Department religious freedom report focuses on terror groups

c. 2015 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON (RNS) Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday (October 14) released his department’s International Religious Freedom Report for 2014, and called terror groups the world’s greatest threat to religious freedom.

The report, considered the most comprehensive accounting of religious freedom violations worldwide, covers nearly 200 countries and territories. But it is nonstate actors, Kerry said at a State Department press conference, that are today “the principal persecutors and preventers of religious tolerance and practice.”