(World Watch Monitor) — Pakistan should be designated a “country of particular concern” because of its violations of religious freedom, according to a group of influential US senators. Senators Bob Menendez, Marco Rubio, Chris Coons, Todd Young, Jeff Merkley and James Lankford wrote to US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson ahead of the Nov. 13 deadline […]
GUIYANG, Guizhou (China Aid) — An imprisoned house church pastor filed a lawsuit against local government departments in China’s southern Guizhou province on Oct. 10, claiming his religious freedom had been violated and that a fine was wrongly imposed on him, ChinaAid learned recently. Li Guozhi, who is known by his alias, Yang Hua, pastored […]
HYDERABAD, India (Morning Star News) – A pastor in Uttar Pradesh, India has lost hearing in one ear after Hindu extremists tortured him, pressured police to falsely charge him and prevented doctors from treating him, sources said. Pastor Abhay Sagar, 37, of Biswan town in Sitapur District in the northern state, was about to begin preaching on Sept. […]
A North Korean man who escaped the country after being arrested, and was granted asylum in the United States, is telling his story of how he had to keep a church he founded underground and secret, else he possibly be put to death. “There were about nine people,” Choi Kwanghyuk told Fox News. “I couldn’t […]
(World Watch Monitor) — A Tajik Protestant church leader serving a three-year sentence for “singing extremist songs in church and so inciting religious hatred” has been moved to a prison 350km from his home and placed in solitary confinement. Bakhrom Kholmatov, 42, was sentenced in July under the Tajik Criminal Code Article 189 (“inciting national, […]
(World Watch Monitor) — Churches in northern Algeria continue to clash with the authorities over permission to hold services in non-religious buildings. Authorities in Tizi Ouzou province—100km east of the capital, Algiers—have said a 2006 law that regulates non-Muslim worship is breached by churches meeting in houses meant only for accommodation or commercial purposes. But […]
India (Mission Network News) — In India, religious minorities are seeing their freedoms slowly erode. The northeastern state of Jharkhand recently became the ninth state to pass anti-conversion laws, which are often used to suppress any religion other than Hinduism. “I think in the little over three years that we’ve had this government in place, we’ve certainly […]
(Morning Star News) – The young man did not answer after his father asked him if he had ditched Islam to become a Christian. Magale (also called Mabala) Hamidu, 20, of Nanoko village in eastern Uganda, had become a Christian seven months before. He had been failing to attend mosque prayers, and his father had […]
(World Watch Monitor) — Police in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala have launched an investigation into a complaint by a woman in her twenties who says she was detained and harassed for 22 days at a yoga center because she had married a Christian, according to The Times of India. A case was registered […]
(Fox News) — President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan suggested Turkey could free an imprisoned American pastor if the Trump administration extradites a Muslim cleric living in Pennsylvania—but the State Department says that won’t happen. American Pastor Andrew Brunson says he was jailed on bogus terrorism charges since his arrest last October. Erdoğan wants to put the […]