01
The indexes
Twenty-seven indicators scoring whether a country's law, institutions, and society are moving toward internationally agreed standards. Broad, comprehensive, and run every fourth year.
Measuring progress
Measuring progress, not only violations
The Eurasia Panel starts from a simple premise: lasting reform cannot be measured only by counting violations. It must also be measured by tracking progress toward internationally recognized standards.
Two instruments are designed to do that. One scores a country against the international commitments it has already made; the other returns every third year to see which of its own recommendations were acted on.
What existing measurement misses
The recommendations are published. Nothing counts the steps toward them.
The Panel measures progress, not because violations matter less, but because sustainable reform requires governments to know what the next achievable step looks like.
International monitoring does not only document violations. USCIRF and the State Department publish detailed recommendations each year for what a government should change, and those reports are accurate, necessary, and specific. The difficulty is what arrives at the other end. A recommendation names a destination, and it lands in a country with its own legal system, security anxieties, and long history of managing religion — where it is often misread, or is simply too large to act on in the form it is written.
The measures accompanying those reports primarily document violations and restrictions. They are particularly effective at identifying deterioration, but provide fewer tools for measuring incremental progress toward implementing a recommendation. A government may carry out several practical reforms that move it substantially closer to one without yet satisfying it completely — and once a state has been designated a Country of Particular Concern or placed on a Special Watch List, that movement becomes almost impossible to see in the outpouring of criticism.
No society reached its present standards in a single move. Major civil-rights reforms, from the abolition of slavery to the extension of women's suffrage, were achieved through a sequence of incremental legal and institutional changes rather than in a single step — in the countries that now do the measuring. That is not an argument for patience with persecution. It is an argument for counting movement, so that a step forward is visible as a step forward and can be acknowledged as one.
The Panel takes a different approach. Rather than measuring violations alone, each indicator describes a condition worth reaching and breaks that objective into practical, measurable steps — the same ground the published recommendations cover, expressed as a sequence a government can actually work through. The baseline is not an outside opinion: it is the commitments made within the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, of which the Central Asian countries are participating states.
That is also why a government has reason to take part. Because progress is measured against commitments it has already accepted, it can demonstrate reform without anyone lowering a standard or negotiating a new benchmark.
The approach
Two instruments, neither sufficient on its own.
Unlike most international indexes, the purpose of this framework is not only to evaluate current conditions but to identify the next practical step toward reform.
- The indexes ask Where does a country currently stand?
- Repeat assessments ask Has it moved since the last assessment?
The two questions use different yardsticks, deliberately. The indexes compare a country with the commitments it has already accepted; the repeat assessments compare a country with itself three years earlier. On its own, the first turns into a ranking of countries against one another, and the second lets any small change count as progress. Together, each keeps the other honest.
02
Repeat assessments
A return visit every third year, testing whether the recommendations from the last assessment were implemented. Focused and implementation-oriented.
Neither instrument alone is sufficient. One shows where a country stands against commitments already undertaken; the other shows whether it moved on the specific steps it agreed to take. Together they separate broad structural change from concrete institutional reform — a distinction neither can draw on its own. Run in sequence they close a loop: what an assessment recommends becomes what the next assessment counts, and what was counted shows up in the score.
Instrument one
One index for the state, one for society.
Designed by LYNC out of a decade of fieldwork in Central Asia, for the Panel to apply. Each index has two halves, and the second half of each is where documents stop being enough.
Religious Policies and Implementation Index
What the state does — on paper, and in practice.
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Law
What the legislation guarantees: registration, worship, education, chaplaincy, conscientious objection, religious dress.
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Implementation
What the state actually does with that law — whether it prosecutes, obstructs, or leaves communities alone.
Religious Pluralism Index
What society does — how communities meet, and what people believe about each other.
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Relationships
Whether multi-faith and church–state meetings happen at all, who is invited, and whether religious communities can act as civic actors.
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Religious literacy
Whether officials, police, prosecutors, religious leaders, and journalists are trained — and what the public actually thinks.
How scoring works
Every indicator uses the same five steps.
Every indicator is designed as a progression rather than a binary yes-or-no judgment: not a verdict, but a position on a ladder, where the band above is always written as something a government could actually do next.
- 4 The international standard
- 3
- 2
- 1
- 0 No movement toward it
- 4 points Yes. Notification to the government is not obligatory.
- 3 points Yes, but there is an obligation to notify the government about the activity of an unregistered religious community or group of believers.
- 2 points Yes, but the government should approve the activity of an unregistered religious community or group of believers.
Below that, 1 point covers a short list of named restrictions, and 0 points means unregistered religious activity is persecuted or restricted excessively.
Elsewhere in the codebook
- LAW-11 The law guarantees the right of everyone to have conscientious objection to military service.
- RELATIONS-1 Regular multi-faith meetings are held with the participation of representatives of both religious majority and religious minorities.
- CCRL-2 Various educational initiatives are available to increase cross-cultural religious literacy (CCRL) among officials, law enforcement, judges, religious leaders, and journalists.
Who sets the steps
The bands are fixed in the codebook and identical for every country — that is what makes one country's score comparable with another's, and with its own from four years earlier. The steps measured by the assessments are the opposite: they are the country's own recommendations, named by its own officials, religious leaders, and civil society.
Where documents run out
The second index reaches where documents cannot: whether multi-faith meetings actually happen and who is invited to them, whether officials, police, prosecutors, religious leaders, and journalists are being trained in Cross-Cultural Religious Literacy(opens in a new tab), and whether minority communities and non-believers report being treated with respect. Those last indicators are answered by national survey, not by reading legislation.
Instrument two
Return every third year and count what was implemented.
A religious freedom assessment ends in recommendations that are sequenced rather than aspirational. The measure of those recommendations is whether they were acted on — so the design is to return to each country on a three-year interval and assess exactly that.
This is a narrower instrument than the indexes, and a blunter one. It does not ask whether conditions feel better; it asks what happened to a specific list. The January 2024 assessment in Uzbekistan recommended platforms for government–religious dialogue, a working group to define religious extremism precisely, a review mechanism for those imprisoned on terrorism charges, and an advisory board on registration. The September 2025 assessment in Kazakhstan named registration procedures, domestic religious scholarship, and institutional accountability. Each of those is a thing that either exists at the next assessment or does not.
Most organizations never go back. Going back is what converts a recommendation from an opinion into a commitment with a date attached.
The closed loop
Neither instrument closes this on its own. What one assessment recommends is what the next one counts, and what it counts is what moves the score.
- 01 Assessment A delegation meets officials, religious leaders, and civil society.
- 02 Recommendations Sequenced steps, named by the country's own participants.
- 03 Implementation Three years in which the steps are taken, or are not.
- 04 Repeat assessment The same list, checked item by item.
- 05 Updated index What moved shows up in the country's score, and the loop begins again.
The two compared
Two complementary instruments.
The indexes place a country against a standard it has already accepted; the assessment cycle tests whether it moved on the specific steps its own officials, religious leaders, and civil society identified. Movement on the second should show up as movement on the first.
| Dimension | The indexes Broad and comprehensive | Repeat assessments Focused and implementation-oriented |
|---|---|---|
| What it measures | Religious freedom and social cohesion in general — law, its implementation, multi-faith and church–state relations, and religious literacy. | Whether the recommendations from the previous assessment were implemented. |
| What it is measured against | International standards: the commitments a country has already made at the UN and the OSCE. | The same international standards, reached through the country’s own list — recommendations drawn up by its officials, religious leaders, and civil society. |
| How the evidence is gathered | Review of legislation and practice, interviews through a regional network of roundtables, and nationwide survey data for the attitude indicators. | A return visit by an assessment delegation, meeting the same institutions and communities as before. |
| Interval | Every fourth year, once running — the point is the direction of travel between rounds. | Every third year, which is roughly how long a sequenced recommendation takes to land. |
| Cost to run | High. Twenty-seven indicators per country, with the national survey work contracted to a professional polling organization such as Gallup rather than run in-house. | Low. One delegation, one visit, against a list that already exists. |
| What it can show | Where a country stands against the standard, and in which direction it is moving. | Whether a specific commitment was acted on, and how far. |
| What it cannot show | Nothing that data cannot reach — which in practice means it is only as good as the survey and interview access behind it. | Anything the recommendations did not name, including deterioration elsewhere. |
Current status
Designed, not yet in use.
Both instruments are fully designed. Neither has been applied systematically: the indexes have scored no country, and while assessment delegations have already worked in the region — Uzbekistan in 2024, Kazakhstan in 2025 — no country has yet been re-assessed against its own recommendations. What this page describes is the method, ready to run.
Where this sits
Measurement belongs to Research.
Both instruments are the Research phase of the cycle doing its work over a longer period than a single visit — evidence gathered with a country rather than about it, then returned to the table the Panel convenes.