A UN Expert investigating religious freedom during a fact-finding trip to Vietnam found his quest blocked after individuals he wanted to meet were intimidated. Heiner Bielefeldt, U.N. Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, feared ‘serious violations’ of faith freedoms in the country, he said on 31 July, after people he was meeting faced…
Mother-of-two Meriam Ibrahim who was freed from jail after she faced Sudanese court sentences of flogging and death-by-hanging for her Christian beliefs has flown from Italy to the USA to start a new life with her family – arriving yesterday, 31 July. The Mayor of Philadelphia, Michael Nutter, greeted her in person and called her…
A married church pastor who was a father to eight children was kidnapped and then killed by suspected members of Islamic militant group Boko Haram, from a location in the north of Cameroon. Pastor Kesvere Jean Marcel, a missionary connected to the Fraternal Lutheran Church, was grabbed and then slaughtered by the fanatics at the…
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…