Christian leaders in Russia are concerned about a bill introduced in parliament that would ban religious services in residential complexes, a publication based in Germany reported.
Authorities in Türkiye have ordered the deportation of a Christian refugee back to Iran, where the pregnant mother would be in serious danger after having fled her country due to arrests for participation in church, sources said.
Three Christians in Iran were tortured before their release on bail on Nov. 17 amid charges of propagating religion contrary to Islam, a religious rights group reported.
With 10 Catholic bishops in China in detention, “disappeared” or forced from their positions, the government-installed bishop of Shanghai at a conference this month spoke only on President Xi Jinping’s “Sinicization” of religion, without mentioning hoped-for pastoral plans.
Persecution of Christians and other religious minorities in Burma (Myanmar) has continued even as the country’s military junta has lost control and territory to armed resistance groups, according to a report last week by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).
This year’s International Day of Prayer (IDOP) for the persecuted church comes as worldwide tensions have turned up pressure on Christians, challenging the global Body of Christ to keep pace in aid and supplication. As Christians are focused on IDOP prayer for the persecuted on both Sunday (Nov. 3) and Nov. 10, tensions that have spiked in the Middle East since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terror attack on Israel have inflamed Islamic extremist sentiment against Christ followers, said an official with
Christians in Sudan are caught between two fighting factions, with each military group accusing them of siding with the other, an advocacy group said.
Authorities in China on Tuesday (Oct. 8) released on bail a church leader jailed since August 2023 for printing Bibles, while the Christian co-founder of a special children’s school has been arrested on charges of “inciting disturbances” for his human rights activism.
China has subjected hundreds of North Koreans to atrocities since last year by forcibly returning them to a country whose leaders hold that religion, especially Christianity, is the greatest threat to its power, experts said at a recent U.S. hearing.
Two decades after the U.S. government designated Vietnam as Country of Particular Concern (CPC) for tolerating or engaging in religious rights violations, religious freedom has deteriorated despite the designation’s initial successes, a new report states.
In the 25 years since the U.S. State Department has designated countries with the worst records of religious rights violations as “Countries of Particular Concern (CPC),” it has applied sanctions related only to those violations just three times, according to a new report.
The conviction of an elderly Christian in Iran for attending a house church shows how the Islamist regime politicizes religious activity, according to leaked cases of 327 Christians charged with crimes related to their faith.
