The Reports and Listings This Atlas Already Cites

Several entries elsewhere in this atlas already carry citations authored by United Nations bodies, without, until this entry, anywhere to attach that authorship in its own right. The Human Rights Council's Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic documented the Islamic State's campaign against the Yazidi religious minority, a report this atlas cites on its Yazidism entry. The Human Rights Council has also reported on the treatment of religious minorities in Iran and issued resolutions condemning violence linked to witchcraft accusations and against people with albinism in regions where such violence is entangled with local religious belief, all of which this atlas draws on as primary human rights documentation rather than as scholarship about religion from the outside.

Separately, UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, maintains the World Heritage List and the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, the second of which is the source this atlas cites for the Kumbh Mela gathering and for the Jongmyo ancestral rites, among other entries. None of this makes the United Nations a custodian of religious teaching, but it does make it, in practice, one of the most frequently cited authors behind this atlas's own bibliography, which is the reason this entry exists.