Our friend and former guest blogger Pasquale Annicchino (European University Institute) has a strong column on the extent to which religious freedom has, and has not, been a priority for the Italian government and the European Union in general over the last decade or so. He criticizes what he describes as vague sloganeering and lack of action, particularly in the context of the many grave threats posed by ISIS. The column is in Italian, but here is a bit of the original with a quick and dirty translation:

Quello che avviene in queste ore era largamente prevedibile, non era forse evitabile. Sono anni che i principali centri di ricerca, tra tutti il Pew Forum, segnalano la crescita di discriminazioni e persecuzioni ai danni di diverse minoranze religiose in varie zone del mondo. La reazione rispetto a questi dati è stata spesso quella di fare spallucce, di dire che poi, effettivamente, niente di così grave stava succedendo. Il governo italiano, tramite l’azione del Ministero degli Esteri, ha provato negli ultimi anni ad interessarsi al tema della libertà religiosa nel contesto della sua politica estera ma i risultati sono stati praticamente nulli.

[What is happening in these moments was largely foreseeable, though perhaps not avoidable. For years, the principal research centers, foremost among them the Pew Forum, signaled the growth of discrimination and persecution of diverse religious minorities in various regions of the world. The reaction to this data was frequently that of shrugging, or of then saying that, effectively, nothing very serious was happening. The Italian government, through the actions of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, has tried in the last years to become interested in the subject of religious freedom in the context of its foreign policy but the results have been almost nothing.]