Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka have declared a “fast unto death” beginning December 12 if the government does not concede to a proposed constitutional amendment and the adoption of anti-conversion laws.
A brutal attack on a Christian book publisher in Ukraine has underscored the high stakes struggle over human rights and religious liberty in the former Soviet republic preparing for a re-run of a sharply contested presidential election.
The ‘Believers’ Church’ in the village of Kammalawa in Kuliyapitiya came under attack on December 2. At about 5pm more than 100 people arrived at the church in western Sri Lanka and told the pastor to stop holding worship services.
Police authorities have arrested 10 Muslim militants in Dutse, the capital of the state of Jigawa in northern Nigeria, for perpetrating an attack on a team of Christian evangelists on Tuesday, November 23. The incident reportedly caused two deaths and left at least 20 people with injuries.
Javier Segura, the 31-year-old pastor of a Mennonite church located in the La Victoria neighborhood of Bogotá, Colombia, died instantly Sunday night, November 28, when a bomb detonated outside a public building near downtown Bogotá. The minister was the only fatality in the 10 p.m. terrorist attack in which six other people suffered injuries.
Religious minorities and the Kosovo office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) are seriously concerned by a draft religion law being discussed by Kosovo’s government.
New evidence has come to light, in secretly recorded tapes obtained by Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom, of oppression of native Mennonite leaders in Vietnam.
Le Thi Hong Lien, the sole woman among six Mennonite church workers sentenced to prison in Vietnam last Friday, is hospitalized with a “mental disease,” according to prison officials.
Members of a Protestant church in Indonesia are still waiting for resolution on an incident with Muslim neighbors, who attacked the church on October 24. The church was then closed down by authorities.
This week members of For Zion’s Sake, a ministry of Calvary Chapel Jerusalem, hoped to send another team from Jerusalem to the town of Beslan, North Ossetia, in southern Russia to comfort the survivors and families of victims of the terror attack on the school there.
Last week before his resignation as U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell said relations between China and the U.S. were at the best point they had been in more than 30 years, according to Agence France-Presse. However, that relationship may change as further evidence emerges of a widespread crackdown on the Chinese church.
Chinese contacts of The Voice of the Martyrs have learned that a prominent Beijing house church leader faces an extremely harsh sentence if convicted in his upcoming trial.
Iranian authorities moved Christian prisoner Hamid Pourmand to a military prison last week, deepening fears throughout the evangelical community for the safety of the Protestant pastor jailed nine weeks ago.
Authorities in District 2 of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, came to the home of Rev. Nguyen Hong Quang and ordered his wife to appear at a neighborhood “review” meeting at 7 p.m.
The People’s Court of Ho Chi Minh City handed out harsh sentences to six Vietnamese Mennonite church workers in a four-hour trial which ended at noon today.
In a two-day international conference on religion and law held in Beijing on October 18 and 19, Chinese officials said they were open to changes in religious policy.
Speaking at the recent International Christian Human Rights Conference at Westminster Chapel in London, Chinese Christian leader Peter Xu said: “They hung me up across an iron gate, then they yanked open the gate and my whole body lifted until my chest nearly split in two. I hung like that for four hours.”
Rev. Rinaldy Damanik, imprisoned on what many believe were false charges, walked free today (Tuesday, November 9) – almost a year earlier than his original release date.
In an arbitrary verdict handed down last week by a Saudi Arabian court, Christian prisoner Brian O’Connor was convicted of the alleged possession and sale of alcohol in the strictly Muslim kingdom.
Around 9:30 p.m. on October 21, snipers shot and injured Hans Sanipi, 25, custodian of the Tabernakel Pentecostal Church in Poso, Central Sulawesi. Sanipi was speaking with several other people in front of the church when two men on a motorbike passed and shot randomly into the crowd.