Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, which studies informed his statement at the launch of the independent review of his Department's work in supporting persecuted Christians that 80 per cent of people who experience religious persecution are Christian.

The statistic referenced is cited in a report "Response to Persecution: Findings of the Under Caesar's Sword Project on Global Christian Communities", led by the Notre Dame Centre for Ethics and Culture, the Religious Freedom Institute, and Georgetown University's Religious Freedom Research Project. In addition, a 2016 Pew Research Centre study found that Christians were the most widely targeted group in 144 countries, up from 128 in 2015.