From FOR SA. (Image: Salah Ait Mokhtar/Unsplash)
Imagine a retired pastor convicted for preaching John 3:16 near a hospital. Not because any statute named preaching as its target, but because a public-order law written for another purpose was read that broadly. Imagine a seventy-five-year-old grandmother arrested twice for standing silently outside a hospital with a sign offering conversation. The law was said to target harassment, not silent presence.
These were not laws framed as restrictions on religion. They arose from ordinary legal instruments (hate speech provisions, public order powers, child welfare law, anti-discrimination law, and new conversion practice bans) tested at their outer limits by prosecutors, regulators, and courts.
This pattern is documented in the Pew Research Centre’s sixteenth annual Global Restrictions on Religion report, published in June, which found government interference with religious practice at a new high across 175 of 198 countries, and in the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom’s 2026 Annual Report (USCIRF report), which similarly flags EU member states for retaining blasphemy and hate speech laws that fall on religious minorities and dissenting believers. Neither claims that legislatures set out to restrict belief; both point to something more pertinent: laws drafted for one purpose extended, case by case, to conduct nobody in Parliament identified as the target.