US Secretary of State, John Kerry, has submitted the 2013 International Religious Freedom annual report to the US Congress which said there were great challenges around the world. The report said: “In 2013, the world witnessed the largest displacement of members of religious communities in recent memory. In almost every corner of the globe, millions of Christians,…
Islamic State (IS) extremists slaughtered 1,500 people in Iraq on 29 July, according to Canon Andrew White, the Vicar of St George’s Church in Baghdad. Canon White wrote the following Facebook update on 30 July:- “Over 1500 killed by Islamic State yesterday. “Sorry FB is not working here so I am sending this message via…
Lord Alton of Liverpool, a Vice Chair of this APPG, opened the debate on the ‘orphaned’ human right of Article 18 – the freedom of religion or belief — in the House of Lords last week. Read the full story of this important debate here. Lord Alton regular updates his blog www.davidalton.net with articles about human…
Sacred Islamic shrines in Iraq’s second largest city Mosul have been blown up by Islamic State (IS) militants with half a dozen revered places targeted and destroyed this past week, end of July 2014, reports The Guardian. The latest building to be bombed by the radical jihadists was the Prophet Jirjis mosque built over the…
A baby girl, her seven-year-old sister and their grandmother suffocated to death after a Pakistani mob set fire to the homes of Ahmadi Muslims in protest at a Facebook post by a young man. An expectant mother also miscarried her baby after the attack. It happened after an argument between some men in Gujranwala town,…
More than 100,000 minority Rohingya Muslims held in camps due to violence by Buddhist extremists face ‘systematic discriminisation’, according to the new United Nations Human Rights Envoy for Myanmar, Yanghee Lee. On July 26, Lee spoke after a 10-day fact-finding mission to the region where she applauded the country’s development in human rights but warned…
Iraqi Christians forced out of their city after a serious death threat from Islamic militant fanatics have been offered asylum by the Government of France. The Christian community of Mosul, considered one of the oldest in the world, fled the country’s second largest city on 19 July after the Islamic State Group (IS) formerly known…
The former Religious Affairs Minister in Myanmar was charged in court on July 22 with undermining national security after he allegedly objected to a raid by Government officials from his own department against the Mahasantisukha monastery in Yangon’s Tamwe township which then led to protests by monks. Hsan Sint is being held in Yamethin prison…
Historian and author William Dalrymple says the death of Arab secularism is on the horizon as Christians are persecuted and pushed out of the Middle East with the past decade deemed especially ‘catastrophic’ for believers. Some 12 million Christians in the region face persecution through Islamic fundamentalism, according to the well-known writer in a newspaper…
On Thursday 24 July, the House of Lords debated the issue of International Freedom of Religion or Belief, Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Lord Alton, a Vice Chair of this All Party Parliamentary Group, began his opening remarks by saying that not only was Article 18 a universal human right, it was…