The Rev. Nguyen Hong Quang was working at a labor camp machine used to extract cashew nuts on August 9 when he was approached by high prison officials. They told him he would be moved immediately to another prison.
Lawyers acting on behalf of the Rev. Nguyen Hong Quang informed his wife last week that his appeal before the People’s Supreme Court of Vietnam has been rescheduled for April 12.
The Sri Lankan government will cast a deciding vote on anti-conversion legislation in April, despite sharp criticism of the “Act for the Protection of Religious Freedom.”
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.
A leading evangelical pastor disappeared off the streets of Asmara four days ago, presumably detained by Eritrean security forces and jailed at some unknown location.
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.
The last 30 from a group of 131 Sunday school leaders and children have been released from custody, but a further church leader has been arrested.
Another 31 Eritrean Christians have been jailed by police in towns north of the capital Asmara over the past 10 days. The latest police sweeps brings the total to 187 arrests for “illegal” Christian activities in Eritrea since the beginning of January.
At least 10 foreign evangelical church leaders including eight Americans, one Taiwanese and an unknown number of South Koreans were detained and later deported by Chinese authorities, a Christian human rights watchdog said Thursday March 3.
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.
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.
Local authorities recently ordered 12 churches in the sub-district of Rancaekek, Bandung, Indonesia, to close their doors. The order came after Muslim clerics protested that the churches were meeting illegally.
Iranian police arrested a Protestant Christian pastor in northern Iran three days ago, jailing him along with his wife and two teenage children.
Christians in Sri Lanka continue to face violent attacks and intimidation following the parliamentary elections in early April. Over 45 churches have been attacked since January, and during the past year more than 140 churches have been forced to close, due to attacks, intimidation and threats.
In what the mass-circulation Hurriyet newspaper called a “jet acquittal,” a criminal court in southeastern Turkey dropped all charges yesterday against a Protestant pastor accused of opening an “illegal” church.
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.
Quechua-speaking villagers in Bolivia are living under an uneasy truce two months after an irate mob destroyed the sole evangelical church in their remote Andean community.