ATLAS of Religious or Belief Minority Rights

The ATLAS of Religious or Belief Minority Rights is a cross-disciplinary project that quantitatively maps and measures the legal rights of religious or belief minorities (RBMs) across European Union (EU) Member States: Data on religious or belief minority rights were collected through thematic Questionnaires on domains - defined as policy areas - such as public schools, spiritual assistance, legal status, family and marriage and religious/belief symbols. National legal experts provided responses, which were validated and structured into indicators and clusters. These were then aggregated to build three indices: the P-Index (promotion and respect of rights), the E-Index (equal treatment among minorities) and the G-Index (majority-minority rights gap). Once all numerical data were defined and validated, the following step was to organize and verify the assigned scores. A Masterplan – an Excel file – was created for each policy area, listing the questions taken into consideration, the 16 States covered, and the 13 religious or belief organizations involved (RBOs). Each cell contains the relevant indicator (the answer) and its assigned score, while an additional column was included to record a brief description of the legal basis or reference supporting that assessment.