Belarus

• Summary
• Adherents
• Religious Freedom
• Socio-economic
• Public Opinion

Indexes⁴

GRI: Government Regulation of religion Index, 0-10, low is less regulation

GFI: Government Favoritism of religion Index, 0-10, low is less favoritism

SRI: Social Regulation of religion Index, 0-10, low is less regulation

Religious Persecution, 0-10, high is more persecution

Largest Religious Groups

History

After seven decades as a constituent republic of the USSR, Belarus attained its independence in 1991. It has retained closer political and economic ties to Russia than any of the other former Soviet republics. Belarus and Russia signed a treaty on a two-state union on 8 December 1999 envisioning greater political and economic integration. Although Belarus agreed to a framework to carry out the accord, serious implementation has yet to take place. Since his election in July 1994 as the country's first president, Alexandr Lukashenko has steadily consolidated his power through authoritarian means. Government restrictions on freedom of speech and the press, peaceful assembly, and religion continue.

Sources

Note: All country histories and flags were obtained from The World Factbook, 2008.

^1.  The U.S. Census Bureau's International Data Base (IDB) is a computerized data bank containing statistical tables of demographic data for 228 countries and areas of the world.

^2.  The U.S. State Department's International Religious Freedom report is submitted to Congress annually by the Department of State in compliance with Section 102(b) of the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) of 1998. This report supplements the most recent Human Rights Reports by providing additional detailed information with respect to matters involving international religious freedom. It includes individual country chapters on the status of religious freedom worldwide. A dataset with these and the other international measures highlighted on the country pages can be downloaded from this website. These State Department reports are open source.

^3.  The United Nations Human Development Reports provide data and statistical analysis in various areas of human development. The Human Development Report (HDR) presents two types of statistics: the human development indicator tables, which provide a global assessment of country achievements in different areas of human development, and thematic statistical analysis. A dataset with these and the other international measures highlighted on the country pages can be downloaded from this website. Used with permission.

^4.  The article by Brian Grim and Roger Finke describes the coding of the U.S. State Department's International Religious Freedom reports. This variable was coded from the reports for 2005. Under their supervision, additional years of the reports are currently being coded by researchers at the Association of Religion Data Archives. Smaller countries not covered by the State Department Reports were coded by researchers at the World Christian Database under the supervision of Todd Johnson, drawing on information from Oxford Press’s World Christian Encyclopedia. A dataset with these and the other international measures highlighted on the country pages can be downloaded from this website. Used with permission.