This mandate for religious tolerance is clearly evident in authoritative guidelines the United Nations Human Rights Committee adopted regarding Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees freedom of thought, conscience and religion in each of the 137 countries which signed and ratified it. The UN’s Human Rights Committee, responsible for ensuring that the Covenant’s signatories comply with its obligations, has expressly warned them not to discriminate against any religion. The Committee has directed the signatories to treat all religions equally, particularly those that are “newly established, or represent religious minorities that may be the subject of hostility by a predominant religious community,” and those that may have a “nontheistic” system of beliefs. (para. 2)

The UN’s foremost authority on religious matters, the Special Rapporteur on Religious Intolerance, has underscored this mandate for a broad approach to defining religion, stating that a group which goes “beyond simple belief and appeals to a divinity, or at the very least, to the supernatural, the transcendent, the absolute, or the sacred, enters into the religious sphere.” The UN Religious Rapporteur also has pointedly rejected standards used by some national governments for granting religious recognition that were based on the size of the group or the number of years it existed.

Other international authorities working in this area take this same approach. The European Court of Human Rights, for example, routinely issues decisions that recognize and protect the rights of minority religions. A related organization, the Human Rights Information Centre of the Directorate of Human Rights of the Council of Europe, has noted that the broad concept of religion under the European Convention on Human Rights is “not confined to widespread and globally recognized religions but also applies to rare and virtually unknown faiths” and that religion must “thus be understood in a broad sense.” And in April 1997, a body of religious experts convened by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a group of more than 50 countries, confirmed that the United Nations’ broad standards should apply to any definition of religion in order to protect nontraditional and minority religions.