OK, the report listing China as "Grave Violations" makes me a bit skeptical.
They had to stretch to list it. China has plenty of religious discrimination, but not against atheists.
They found these two reasons:
It is illegal to register
an explicitly Humanist,
atheist, secularist or
other non-religious
NGO or other human
rights organization, or
such groups are
persecuted by
authorities
No, it's illegal to advocate
political positions or topics without approval. Human rights are incidentally political, particularly in China, but it would be very easy to simply advocate atheism without getting into the politics of human rights.
And the main human rights issues they're not allowed to attack is the persecution of religions (not atheism).
It's also hard for people to register companies or NGOs in China, period, because of their system. That's a completely different matter.
If that's what they call persecution...
Expression of core
Humanist principles on
democracy, freedom
and human rights is
brutally repressed
Brutally? There are a hand full of people in prison (leadership positions) for criticizing the Chinese government on human rights matters.
Most people just get their social media accounts banned today.
If that's brutal, they need to find another word for what other countries do. They're setting the bar pretty low with that one.
And looking at comparisons with other countries they merely called severe, there seems to be some monkey business going on here.
They should have (if not biased) gone with the categories below that, but I'm not a fan of their ranking system, particularly for China since it's not a good representation.
Much less discrimination against atheists in China than in North America or Europe.