Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide

Paul Marshall is a steering committee member for the Christianity and Freedom Project and is a chapter contributor on the “Global Overview of Persecution.” Marshall is also a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom and the author and editor of more than twenty books on religion and politics, especially religious freedom, including more recently, Silenced: How Apostasy Laws and Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide (2011), Blind Spot: When Journalists Don't Get Religion (2009), Religious Freedom in the World (2008), and Radical Islam's Rules: The Worldwide Spread of Extreme Sharia Law (2005). He is in frequent demand for lectures and media appearances, including interviews on ABC Evening News; CNN; PBS; Fox; the British, Australian, Canadian, South African, Japanese Broadcasting Corporations, and Al Jazeera.

Nina Shea is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, where she directs the Center for Religious Freedom, a Commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, and an international human-rights lawyer. For over a decade, she has worked for the advancement of individual religious freedom in U.S. foreign policy. She helped organize and lead a coalition of churches and religious groups that worked to end a religious war against non-Muslims and dissident Muslims in southern Sudan; in 2004 and 2005, she advised in the drafting of the religious freedom provisions in Iraq’s constitution; and, she authored and edited two reports, Saudi Arabia’s Curriculum of Intolerance (2006), and Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques (2005), both of which translated and analyzed Saudi governmental publications that teach hatred and violence against the religious “other.” She regularly presents testimony before Congress, delivers public lectures, organizes briefings and conferences, and writes frequently on religious freedom issues. She is the author of In the Lion’s Den, which documents worldwide Christian persecution. She is a graduate of Smith College, and American University’s Washington College of Law. In February 2008, she participated in the Berkley Center’s “Why Religious Freedom? The Origins and Promise of U.S. International Religious Freedom Policy” symposia.