A VATICAN observer and human-rights experts have warned of growing threats to Christians worldwide, against the background of continued demands for the European Union to appoint a Christian-rights coordinator.
Speaking to diplomats and civil-society representatives at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva (23 February to 31 March), the Vatican’s Permanent Observer to the UN, Archbishop Ettore Balestrero, said: “Religious freedom is one of the absolute minimum requirements necessary for living with dignity — it was historically the first human right to be recognised and touches the constitutive dimension of humanity.”
He was addressing the first session devoted to anti-Christian discrimination, on 4 March. He continued: “It is deeply unjust and profoundly concerning that almost 400 million Christians are subjected to physical violence, subjugation, false detention, expropriation of their property, enslavement, forced exile, and even murder because of their religious beliefs.”
Christians were currently the world’s “most persecuted religious community”, he said. In 2025, one in seven in the world had been persecuted, and almost 5000 — 13 per day — had been killed for their faith.
Hundreds of anti-Christian hate crimes were being reported regularly across Europe, including “physical assaults, murders, vandalism of places of worship, desecration of cemeteries and arson attacks on churches”.
Archbishop Balestrero said: “It is the state’s duty to protect freedom of religion or belief, which includes preventing third parties from violating this right. . . Yet impunity remains one of the most serious issues.
“There are other, more subtle and often silent forms of persecution that are not easily captured by statistics. These include a kind of ‘polite persecution’, which often takes the form of discrimination through gradual marginalisation and exclusion from political, social, and professional life, even in traditionally Christian lands.”
A European Parliament resolution in January urged the European Commission to appoint a coordinator to combat anti-Christian intolerance in the EU. Last August, a report from the Organisation on Security and Co-operation in Europe said that growing anti-Christian incidents reflected “broader societal divisions, systemic prejudice and rising intolerance”, but were being “downplayed, under-reported or politically overlooked”.
Addressing the Human Rights Council, the UN’s special rapporteur on religious freedom, Nazila Ghanea, said that persecution victims were often “subjected to multiple and overlapping forms of violence”.
The director of a Vienna-based Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians, Anja Tang, said that curbs on religious freedom were currently “on the rise” in Europe, where several governments had targeted Christians “for peacefully expressing their religious beliefs”.
In his speech, Archbishop Balestrero said that Europe’s “polite persecution” took the form of discreet restrictions, which effectively “narrowed and annulled” previously recognised rights, and made those reading the Bible or praying publicly liable to prosecution.
“In Western countries, human rights firmly enshrined in binding international instruments . . . are sometimes overridden by competing interests or claims to so- called ‘new rights’, whose normative status is not established.
“These are not superficial acts. They are serious violations of the rights of Christians, perpetrated by the very authorities who are charged with respecting, protecting, and promoting the human rights of all. This contradiction must end.”