This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Freedom of religion or belief has been part of Amnesty International's mandate from the start, and its documentation of prisoners of conscience, a category the organization itself named and popularized in its early campaigning, includes clergy, religious minorities and converts detained or persecuted specifically for their beliefs rather than for any other conduct. That documentation is among the most widely cited human rights sourcing on religious persecution worldwide, drawn on by governments, journalists and other human rights bodies whose own reporting on a given country's religious freedom record regularly traces back to an Amnesty case file.
The organization accepts no government funding, a structural choice meant to preserve its independence when documenting states' own conduct, including their treatment of religious minorities and dissenters who might otherwise have no outside advocate. Its case by case reporting on individual prisoners of conscience, rather than country level assessment alone, is what has made its religious persecution documentation a recurring source across the wider field of human rights and religious freedom monitoring, since a named individual's case can be checked, followed and advocated for in a way a general finding cannot.