Restrictions decided by governments to limit a few typical kinds of religious expression such as visible symbols or clothes, ritual slaughter, religious circumcision, places of worship; ambiguous treatment of conscientious objection for religious reasons by employers; worrying increase in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Western Europe is now in the list of the “monitored” countries drawn up by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, USCIRF, in his Annual Report 2016 published on 2 May. This 17th edition of the Report certifies violations of religious freedom place by place, in over 30 countries in the world. In the map – next to the countries in red (China, North Korea, Iraq and Syria) or orange (Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan, Cuba and India) – the whole Western Europe is beige. Restrictions of religious freedom by European governments (too) are meant to grant equal opportunities to everyone and rules of coexistence in more and more plural societies. However, there is an “opposite effect”: “They generate an atmosphere of social intolerance against specific religious groups, thus limiting their social and educational integration, as well as working opportunities”.
The Report says that in several European countries personal use of visible religious symbols is limited in some contexts (Islam headscarves, Sikh turbans, Jewish kippah, and Christian Crosses). The Report also says that in some countries such as Italy the number of mosques is not sufficient for communities. As for conscientious objection, in many European countries problems arise when religious beliefs collide either with government policies or employers’ requirements.
Growth of anti-Semitism in Europe is emphasised in the Report, and with much concern. In 2015, 7,900 French Jews left France (1,900 in 2012). As for Islamophobia, the US Report says: “Over one million migrants and asylum-seekers reached Europe in an irregular way in 2015, most of them coming from Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan. They arrived at the time of Islamic terror attacks, and the migration flow was managed by European governments in a chaotic way”. This situation caused “escalation of anti-Muslim sentiment; even though many of them were escaping conflicts, those migrants (mostly Muslims) were regarded with suspect and fear”.