The first three reporters to lead this project were Felix Corley, Geraldine Fagan, and Igor Rotar.
They had previously done similar reporting for the UK-based Keston News Service[2] and continued this work at Forum 18 after Keston Institute closed its news service due to financial difficulties and staff changes.
[3] The news service mainly concentrates on the states of the former Soviet Union, including Belarus, Georgia,[4] Tajikistan,[5] Turkmenistan,[6] Uzbekistan,[7][8] Central Asia, and Eastern Europe, but has also published reports on Kosovo,[9] Macedonia, Serbia, Turkey, Burma, China[10] (including Xinjiang), Laos, Mongolia, North Korea,[11] and Vietnam.
In August 2005 one of the organisation's reporters was detained and deported by the authorities at Tashkent airport in Uzbekistan,[12] but it carries on covering that country.
The reports on religious freedom from Forum 18 News Service are widely used by international organizations like Amnesty International,[13] Human Rights Watch,[14] and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE),[15] as well as numerous news sites with different religious affiliation (i.e. Muslim,[16] Christian,[17] Bahá'í,[18] and Buddhist[19]).