The government of Eritrea has released 70 Christians who had been in prison for between two to twelve years without trial, International Christian Concern reports. However, rights advocates do not believe this action by the military dictatorship signals a change in its abusive stance toward Evangelical Christians.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Monday that the Biden administration had decided to return the US to the UN Human Rights Council, reversing the departure by former president Donald Trump, who cited ongoing Israel bias by the body in his decision to leave.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers came out in support of new domestic terror laws this week, despite earlier opposition from over 150 civil rights groups that were concerned about the implications for minority communities.
Israel has a new political party committed solely to tackling what it says are “years of injustices” in the country’s Ministry of Health that have led to the current catastrophic handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, All Israel News reports. Offering policies that contradict the government’s extensive lockdown and other preventive measures, the “Rapeh” (Be Healthy) party is now listed for the March 2021 general election.
The International Criminal Court in The Hague has convicted a former commander in the notorious Ugandan rebel group Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) of dozens of war crimes and crimes against humanity ranging from multiple murders to forced marriages. Dominic Ongwen faces a maximum punishment of life imprisonment.
U.S. President Joe Biden said Monday he was considering reimposing sanctions against Myanmar after the military seized power in a coup.
A near-total ban on abortion has taken effect in Poland and triggered a new round of nationwide protests three months after a top court ruled that the abortion of congenitally damaged fetuses is unconstitutional.
A Christian online writer who already received lashes for expressing her faith in Christ and criticizing Iran’s human rights abuses has been detained again, supporters said Thursday.
Ethiopia is in the midst of a full-blown humanitarian crisis as refugees flee to the border with Sudan and up to two million people face starvation while the government wars against a separatist group in the country’s Tigray region, CBN News reports. Among daily reports of mass killings on both sides is the reported massacre of over 700 Orthodox Christians outside their church in Tigray’s city of Aksum earlier this month.
The international Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) human rights organization has called for the immediate release of a pastor who is in custody in Cuba on what the group says are “trumped-up charges.” Cuban pastor Karel Parra Rosabal was arrested in Las Tunas on January 12 apparently because of his involvement with the Apostolic Movement, a network of independent churches that the Cuban government refuses to register, rendering them effectively illegal.
Around 1 million people in the Kurdish-governed region of Al-Hasakah in Syria’s northeast have again had their water supply cut off — as they have around 20 times in the past 12 months.
Russia’s prominent Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was detained at a Moscow airport Sunday after returning from Germany, where he received medical treatment for nerve agent poisoning.
Israel carried out a series of airstrikes in eastern Syria early Wednesday, targeting Iran-backed forces and killing at least 57 fighters and wounding many others, the Associated Press (AP) reports.
Having just announced it plans to enrich uranium at a level far above that allowed by the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the Iranian regime said Tuesday that it is installing 1,000 additional centrifuges and increasing its supply of yellowcake, a uranium concentrate powder used for enrichment.
A house church in China’s Taiyuan city was raided by forty government officials who arrested the pastor and five female members of the congregation at the same time, Christian Headlines reported Monday. While the five women were released some hours after the raid, Pastor An Yankui, whose home the church meets in, was detained for 15 days.
China faces international pressure for sentencing an independent Christian journalist to four-year imprisonment over her coverage of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan city. Zhang Zhan, 37, reportedly saw it as “God’s will’ to be among the few people whose firsthand accounts from crowded hospitals and empty streets painted a more gloomy picture of the COVID-19 epicenter than the official narrative.
Just weeks before taking office, the incoming U.S. administration of President-elect Joe Biden has received an unwelcome housewarming gift from the European Union in the form of a wide-ranging investment treaty agreed to in principle between the EU and China.
Christians in a movement of former Muslims and other believers welcomed a decision by Indonesia’s government to ban an Islamist group that attacked churches and other targets.
Four weapons manufacturing facilities were destroyed in northwestern Syria early Friday morning in a series of airstrikes attributed to Israel, according to satellite images released by a private Israeli intelligence firm.
A groundbreaking new study entitled “Persecuting Faith” has found that Christianity is the most persecuted faith in secretive North Korea, Christianity Today reports. Drawing on the testimonies of 117 defectors, the 2020 report was published by the Korea Future Initiative (KFI) in the hope it will inform any future human rights sanctions applied to North Korea by Western countries.