Many human rights are neglected, but religious freedom is often strikingly so. The late Abe Rosenthal, looking back over five decades working at the New York Times, wrote: "I realized that in decades of reporting, writing or assigning stories on human rights, I rarely touched on the most important. Political, legal, civil and press rights, emphatically often; but the right to worship where and how God or conscience leads, almost never."
In the case of Iranian Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, currently sentenced to death for converting to Christianity, it was only after international media had picked up the story and the White House, the Canadian government, the British Foreign Office, France, and the EU had already issued public statements calling for his release that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International issued basic statements on their websites condemning his treatment. As Ziya Meral notes: "You know something is really wrong when a major human rights group pick(s) up on a human rights concern after governments, mainstream and social media do."
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