In early March, China adopted the new Regulations on Religious Affairs, first announced by the government in December 2004. The government claims the new regulations are a step towards religious freedom. However, some Christian leaders have expressed serious concerns, particularly with the issue of church registration.
Last Sunday evening, Eritrean security police arrested 16 Protestants for watching a Christian video together in a church member’s home in the town of Adi-Kibe.
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.
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.
For the first time in history, Chinese Christians gave evidence of persecution in April at a special meeting called by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) in Geneva. Several speakers testified to beatings, imprisonment, torture and damage to church buildings in recent years.
The host of a Turkish TV news show was sentenced to nearly two years in jail last week for airing false provocations against Turkish Protestants.
Police in the Eritrean capital of Asmara continued the country-wide crackdown against independent Protestant congregations this month, arresting another 12 evangelicals on September 7 while they were meeting in a private house for prayer and worship.
Fifty-seven teenage Eritrean Christians jailed last week under severe punishment for having Bibles at their military training camp remain locked in metal shipping containers, inside sources confirmed today.
Asmara Police Jail, Punish 56 Prisoners Special to Compass Direct LOS ANGELES, May 8 (Compass) — Eritrean security police arrested two full-time evangelists and another 54 members of the Rema Church last night in Asmara, hauling them off to a local police station for holding illegal prayer meetings in two homes of their members. The prayer meetings were in progress in the capital’s Kahawta district when security forces raided the homes about 6 p.m., forcing the Protestant believers to stop their worship. The jailed Christians, 21 women and 35 men, remained under detention today at the No. 7 Police Station … Read more
A total of 170 Protestant Christians have been jailed, beaten and threatened with death by Eritrean security forces in a harsh crackdown during February and March.
Amid growing pressure on Protestant congregations, two leaders of the unregistered Pentecostal church Living Stones have been arrested and given fifteen-day prison terms, Protestant sources in the Azerbaijani capital Baku have told Keston News Service. The two – Yusuf Farkhadov and Kasym Kasymov – were detained in Sumgait, a town close to Baku, when police and National Security Ministry officers raided a prayer meeting last Friday (18 January) held in a private flat in the town’s 9th micro-district. The two were given the two-week prison term under Article 310 of the Administrative Code, which punishes “petty hooliganism”. “All they were doing was praying,” one church member told Keston. They are serving their term in police detention cells in Sumgait.
Evangelical church leaders Kiros Meles and Abebayeh Desalegn walked free today after being jailed without charges for 10 months in the northern Ethiopian town of Maychew.
Evangelical Christians in northern Ethiopia confirmed yesterday that instead of being released as expected, two local church elders jailed without charges for 10 months were remanded back to prison two days ago by a local court judge.
Eritrean police arrested and jailed another Protestant evangelical pastor on Sunday, taking him and seven of his church members to prison.
WASHINGTON (BP)–The considerable influence of American Christians can make a difference in the lives of persecuted believers in North Korea and Sudan, participants at a May 1 summit on the issue were told.
In mid-April four Protestant churches – the charismatic Cornerstone Church and Free Church, the Baptist Free Bible Church and an unregistered Pentecostal congregation – were all evicted from state premises which they had been renting for worship services in the capital of Tatarstan, Kazan.
SANTA ANA, CA (ANS) — Turkish security police ordered a Protestant Christian congregation meeting for 40 years in the southeastern port city of Iskenderun to close its doors in mid-June, declaring the church had “no legal basis” and that its activities were harmful to society, Compass Direct reported today.
he authorities in Karakalpakstan, an autonomous republic in the north-west of Uzbekistan, are trying to halt the spread of Christianity among Karakalpakstan’s native peoples (Uzbeks, Kazakhs and Karakalpaks, who are historically Muslims),
Perhaps because of international reporting on the case, a court in Nukus, the capital of the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan in western Uzbekistan, has handed down what many regard as a “lenient” sentence against the leader of a local Protestant church.
ASTANA / BUDAPEST , (ANS) — Leaders and other believers of non registered Baptist and Evangelical churches in the former Soviet republic of Kazakstan are experiencing a new period of persecution by central authorities, reports said Monday July 1.