A/HRC/40/58 I. Activities of the Special Rapporteur since August 2018 In its resolution 31/16, adopted in March 2016, the Human Rights Council extended the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief for a period of three years. The Council appointed Ahmed Shaheed as the Special Rapporteur at its thirty-second session. He assumed his mandate on 1 November 2016. 1. An overview of the activities of the mandate holder between 1 November 2017 and 31 July 2018 is provided in the most recent report that he presented to the General Assembly at its seventy-third session (A/73/362). In addition, he was invited to a number of meetings and consultations on freedom of religion or belief, including the international seminar on Islamophobia of the Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), held in Istanbul on 17 and 18 September 2018, and the Interfaith Forum of the Group of 20 (G-20), held in Buenos Aires from 26 to 28 September. He also participated in a national conference on promoting freedom of religion or belief, held in Oslo in November, a workshop of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on a toolkit titled “#faith4rights”, held in Collonges, Switzerland, on 13 and 14 December, and a side event on combating anti-Semitism in Europe and beyond, held in Geneva on 17 December. 2. Furthermore, he undertook a country visit to Tunisia from 9 to 19 April. In 2018, the Special Rapporteur sent 39 communications and issued 20 press releases to raise his voice against the violation of freedom of religion or belief in various countries. He also sent requests for country visits to Malaysia, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia and Sri Lanka. His requests to visit the Netherlands and Sri Lanka were accepted. 3. II. Introduction: freedoms of thought, conscience, religion or belief, opinion and expression The current age is one of unprecedented opportunity for human expression and interaction driven by unparalleled human mobility and developments in information and communication technologies, which have increased the speed and amplified the volume of such exchanges. At the same time, there has been a resurgence of old constraints along with the emergence of new legal and extralegal limitations on freedom of expression wielded by State and non-State actors. Those include a revival of anti-blasphemy and anti-apostasy laws, the proliferation of, and increasing reliance on, public order laws to restrict the freedom to express views deemed offensive to religious or belief communities, along with increasing investments in strategies to combat incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence on the basis of religion or belief. 4. The importance of freedom of opinion and expression to self-development, the search for truth, democratic legitimation and the protection of other human rights is self-evident. Clearly, freedom of expression is also indispensable to the enjoyment of all other rights, such as the right to remedy and redress and, by the same token, the ability to hold duty-bearers to account. Its import to the enjoyment of freedom of religion or belief is no exception. Given their mutually reinforcing nature, the fates of these two rights are entwined, such that the violation of one is frequently tantamount to contrivance to undermine the other. 5. The two rights, in many ways, speak to the multifaceted nature of human expression as a vehicle for exploring opinion, articulating thought, searching for the truth and manifesting one’s belief, either individually or in community with others, insomuch that the legal framework for ensuring both freedoms recognizes both the non-derogable nature of protections for the internal dimension of these rights (forum internum), and the limited need for restricting certain instances of their public exercise for the sake of mitigating any negative impact on other human rights, public safety and order. 6. Moreover, a core aspect of freedom of religion or belief, namely the right to peaceful manifestation, relies on the degree of protection afforded to freedom of expression in both verbal and non-verbal form, facilitated through multiple media. Likewise, where there is no respect for the freedom of thought and conscience, the same is likely to be true for the right 7. 2