E/CN.4/2001/0063 page 46 184. When considering this overview of the situation of minorities, it should also be borne in mind that minorities themselves may occasionally be sources of intolerance towards their own members (for example, the collective suicide organized by the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Uganda) or towards other religious or faith-based communities (in Georgia or Chad, for example, where aggressive proselytism by missionaries is undermining the harmony between the Muslim majority and Christian minorities). 185. It nevertheless remains the case that the worldwide trend as regards religion and belief is towards increased intolerance and discrimination against minorities and a failure to take account of their specific requirements and needs. 186. A study of the communications further reveals that the status of women is still highly unsatisfactory, sometimes even tragic. The communications reflected in this report refer to extreme situations and cases that are usually caused by non-State entities (such as the “apartheid” practised against women by the Taliban in Afghanistan on the basis of their own interpretation of religion; the abduction and execution of a female intellectual by the Hezbollah in Turkey; and the physical violence, including the murder of believers, including nuns, perpetrated by extremists in Lebanon, Indonesia, Georgia and India). However, as the Special Rapporteur’s mission reports indicate in greater depth, women all over the world must deal with sex discrimination on a fairly significant level, and such discrimination is caused not only by the weight of social tradition but also by State policy (e.g. access to posts of responsibility in the political, economic and other spheres). 187. An appraisal of the communications covered in this report also shows how vulnerable minorities and women are to the ever-worsening scourge of extremism. This phenomenon, which is complex, having religious, political and ethical roots, and has diverse objectives (purely political and/or religious), respects no religion. It has hijacked Islam (as in Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, the Philippines and Turkey), Judaism (in Israel), Christianity (in Georgia) and Hinduism (in India). Besides vulnerable groups, the casualties of this aberration are entire religious communities, other dynamic forces in society such as NGOs (Pakistan), and, of course, religions themselves. Extremist organizations use a variety of means to achieve their objective of securing power and/or imposing an exclusive truth, including physical violence, such as murder, and legal means, such as recourse to accusations of blasphemy. Although legislation that punishes defamation, including blasphemy, is designed to protect religion and addresses a legitimate concern, particularly with regard to phenomena such as fear of Islam and Christianity, it must be acknowledged that blasphemy or defamation are increasingly used by extremists to censure all legitimate critical debate within religions (Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan) or to bring to heel certain minorities accused of holding erroneous views (Pakistan). Of course, extremism does not and cannot operate in a vacuum, and in fact it frequently receives either active or passive support (in the absence of measures to curb it) from national and foreign State entities. 188. Finally, the communications dealt with in this report demonstrate the persistence of State policies that have an impact on the freedom of religion and belief of minorities (see above) and of the majority (in Myanmar, China and Viet Nam, for example). The difficult and strained relationship between politics and religion, illustrated inter alia by extremism, can often have