A simmering dispute over the closing of dozens of evangelical churches by the government broke into the open when a leading evangelical member of Costa Ricas Congress staged a protest by climbing the country’s principal monument.
An Iranian Colonel who, despite Western protests, was jailed last month for his alleged “illegal” conversion to Christianity is held at Tehran’s notorious maximum-security prison with well-known political and religious dissidents, a Christian news agency reported late Friday, March 11.
The criminal trial of Egyptian Christian Shafik Saleh Shafik, begun in mid January, has been ordered postponed until February 20 by the presiding judge, who accepted defense petitions to summon key witnesses and police reports related to the case.
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.
During the Easter weekend of April 10 and 11, and on some days afterward, Montagnards in Vietnam’s Central Highlands attempted to stage demonstrations to call attention to the harsh injustices they suffer at the hands of communist authorities and ethnic Vietnamese settlers.
As the campaign for elections to India’s parliament reached its heights, Indian officials ordered a Christian missionary to leave the country.
Sectarian violence has erupted again in Ambon, South Moluccas, Indonesia, dealing a blow to the tentative Muslim-Christian dialogue that brought relative peace to the area in February this year.
Human rights watchdog The Voice of the Martyrs (VOM) urged Christians Saturday, March 13, to pray for three representatives of China?s rapidly growing house church movement who it said were due to appear in a Chinese court on charges of “providing intelligence to overseas organizations.”
Egyptian Christian Bolis Rezek-Allah was pulled off an international flight this afternoon in Cairo, Egypt, and is being held by Egyptian secret police. Rezek-Allah, who had been granted an immigrant visa to Canada, was on the plane to leave Egypt when police arrested him.
In late April, Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former Catholic priest, declared voodoo an officially recognized religion. The decision means, among other things, that marriage ceremonies conducted by voodoo priests now have equal standing with Catholic ones.
Violence in predominantly Christian Plateau State in Nigeria has continued unabated since the first major outbreak in Jos, in 2001 when over 2,000 people are thought to have died in orchestrated inter religious violence.
by Miss World Protests At least one hundred people were killed and 200 injured yesterday as Muslim youths rampaged through the capital of Kaduna State in Nigeria in protest at a newspaper article that was said to have blasphemed the Prophet Mohammed. Muslim youths arrived in Kaduna city in a convoy of buses bearing Arabic inscriptions which observers suspected of belonging to an Islamic organisation. As the day wore on the protest became more violent. Chanting “Allahu Akbar” (God is Great), thousands of youths marched on the Kaduna offices of ThisDay where they proceeded to search for the Chief Correspondent, … Read more
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)–The revelation by North Korea that it had engaged in a clandestine operation to develop nuclear weapons, contrary to promises made to the Clinton administration in 1994, thrust the Asian nation again into the news. However, many in the United States have had the communist nation on their minds and in their prayers for years for its shoddy record in human rights.
Saudi Arabian authorities transferred the last five of 14 foreign Christians from their Jeddah prison cell to a deportation center yesterday, according to nine other Christian prisoners already moved there on December 22 and 23.
WASHINGTON (BP)–The State Department’s second report on global religious liberty presents a challenge for the U.S. government to act against persecution, the chairman of a federal commission said.
BANGALORE, India (Compass) — The Indian government has launched its own “war on terrorism” against two fronts: terrorists and missionaries. The Hindu fundamentalist government is planning to introduce two bills that are being condemned as “draconian” by religious minorities in India.
Evangelical Christians blamed for the unrest in Vietnam’s Central Highlands in early February have been abducted, tortured and prevented from worshipping together by security police, according to reports from the region.
A Christian Uzbek pastor jailed since February 1999 on contrived fraud charges is being subjected to physical beatings for witnessing to his cellmates, church sources in the Central Asian republic reported in early March.