The Worst Places to Practice Your Faith in 2026, and Why the UN Must Change

October 2026 brought a grim run of headlines: at least 60 Orthodox Christians killed in Ethiopia's Oromia region, nine mourners shot dead at a church funeral in Karak, Jordan, a mob attack on a Christian town in Syria and fresh detentions of house church members in China. These were not random events. The major annual surveys of religious persecution have been describing the same patterns for years. The question is why the world keeps reading the reports and changing so little.

The Red List: Five Kinds of Danger

Global Christian Relief released its 2026 Red List on January 8. It draws on the Violent Incidents Database maintained with the International Institute for Religious Freedom and covers the period from November 1, 2023 to October 31, 2025, according to Baptist Press and The Christian Post. Instead of producing one overall ranking, it lists the worst countries in five categories of harm.

Killings. Nigeria led with 590 Christians killed, followed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo with 447, Ethiopia with 177, Russia with 167 and Mozambique with 94. The report counted 1,972 killings in total.

Violence against churches. Rwanda topped this category with 7,700 incidents, a figure driven by the mass closure of churches by authorities, followed by Mozambique with 1,382, Myanmar with 1,042, Nicaragua with 1,023 and Ukraine with 678.

Arrests. China ranked first with 709 arrests, followed by Russia with 323, Iran with 149, Vietnam with 116 and Nicaragua with 114.

Displacement. Mozambique ranked first with 13,298 people displaced, followed by Myanmar with 2,285, Nigeria with 2,001, India with 1,134 and Mexico with 875, for a total of 21,101.

Assaults and abductions. Mexico led with 376, followed by Nigeria with 354, India with 288, Ethiopia with 183 and Myanmar with 161, out of 3,018 in total.

The categories matter because they show that persecution takes different forms. In Nigeria and Ethiopia, the danger is violence by armed groups that states fail to stop. In China, Russia and Iran, the danger comes from the state itself, through arrests and closures.

The World Watch List and USCIRF

Open Doors' 2026 World Watch List estimates that more than 388 million Christians face high levels of persecution and discrimination, about one in seven worldwide. North Korea ranks first for the 24th time. The rest of the top ten are Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Eritrea, Syria, Nigeria, Pakistan, Libya and Iran. Open Doors counted 4,849 Christians killed for faith related reasons in its reporting period, 3,490 of them in Nigeria. Ethiopia ranks 36th, China 17th and Jordan 49th.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom, which looks at people of all faiths, recommended 18 countries as Countries of Particular Concern in its 2026 annual report: Afghanistan, Burma, China, Cuba, Eritrea, India, Iran, Libya, Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Vietnam. It recommended 11 more for the Special Watch List, including Egypt, Iraq, Turkey and Indonesia.

Not every list agrees, and they use different methods. But the same names recur across all three: Nigeria, China, Iran, Syria, Eritrea, Myanmar and Nicaragua among them. When independent monitors using different data reach the same conclusions year after year, the problem is not a lack of information.

The Laws Being Violated

The rules are clear and widely accepted.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 18 guarantees freedom of thought, conscience and religion, including the freedom to change religion and to manifest it in teaching, practice and observance. Article 3 guarantees life, liberty and security of person.

ICCPR. For the 170 plus states that are party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 18 is binding, and under Article 4(2) it cannot be suspended even in a public emergency. Article 6 protects the right to life, Article 9 forbids arbitrary arrest, Article 26 guarantees equal protection, and Article 27 protects religious minorities.

The 1981 Declaration. The UN Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief sets out concrete freedoms in Article 6, from assembling for religious purposes to training leaders and maintaining places of prayer.

The Genocide Convention. Where killings are committed with intent to destroy a religious group in whole or in part, the 1948 Genocide Convention obliges states to prevent and punish them. That threshold is demanding, and it should be applied only on solid evidence.

Why the UN Falls Short

The UN has a Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, created in 1986, the Universal Periodic Review, the Rabat Plan of Action against incitement, Human Rights Council resolution 16/18 and a Plan of Action to Safeguard Religious Sites. All of them rely on voluntary cooperation. A state can ignore a Special Rapporteur's letter, accept UPR recommendations and never implement them, and invoke Article 2, paragraph 7 of the UN Charter, which shields matters within domestic jurisdiction. Some states named in these reports have held seats on the Human Rights Council, and one, China, holds a Security Council veto.

What Joseph Bonner's Draft Resolution Would Do

Joseph Bonner's draft for the General Assembly's eighty-first session, "Strengthening of the United Nations system: UN 2.0 and Supranational Integration," dated 23 March 2026 and submitted by the Human Rights Delegation/GHRTF, does not mention religious persecution or name any country. It goes after the structural weakness every list above exposes: the UN can document, but it cannot enforce.

The draft would:

Transition the UN Emergency Platform into a "Binding Operational Authority during global shocks that exceed national capacities."

Decide to initiate the Article 109 Charter Review process to create a Supranational Oversight Council with power to issue "mandatory directives that override national domestic jurisdiction in matters of global security," binding "notwithstanding the provisions of Article 2, paragraph 7," during a declared global emergency.

Ask the Secretary-General to set up a High-Level Panel on Supranational Oversight to draft bylaws for a Unified Global Response Force and "a binding legislative framework."

Urge Member States to sign a "Universal Sovereignty-Sharing Agreement" by the end of the 81st session.

Protect national sovereignty through a Mandatory Reversion Clause that returns all powers once the General Assembly verifies de-escalation.

For countries where armed groups kill believers faster than governments can respond, as the Red List shows in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia and Mozambique, a binding response authority speaks directly to the problem. For states that are themselves the persecutors, the draft's challenge to the domestic jurisdiction shield is the starting point for a debate the UN has postponed for decades. Those powers would apply only in declared emergencies, and Charter amendments require the ratification of all five permanent members, which means the draft opens a negotiation rather than ending one.

A Wake Up Call

Every January the lists are published, and every year the same countries appear on them. The victims in Oromia, Karak and Al-Suqaylabiyah this October were not failed by a lack of data. They were failed by a system that cannot act on it. Joseph Bonner's draft resolution never advanced. He plans to bring it back before world leaders next year and is currently seeking sponsors among Member States willing to put enforcement, not just reporting, on the agenda.