Tag Archives: Global: Religious Freedom

AP: The Inter-Religious Council of Kenya said Muslims will form vigilante groups alongside Christians to guard churches in Kenya’s North Eastern Province, where the latest attacks occurred.

Petro, Nicolai N., The Role of the Orthodox Church in a Changing Russia (2012). ISPI Analysis #121 (Institute for the Study of International Politics, Milan, Italy), June 2012. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2094490

NY Daily News: A woman Congress legislator from Assam was thrashed by a mob at a hotel in Karimganj town late Friday night after she converted to Islam and married a Muslim friend, police said Saturday.

AllAfrica.com: Lt. Col Ishaq Rano, Assistant Director, Islamic Affairs of the Nigerian Army, says that killing and bombing of Churches by the Boko Haram sect is forbidden in Islam. Rano, who spoke during the special Juma’at prayer to commemorate the 2012 Nigerian army day celebration in Jos, said Boko Haram members were not “good Muslims” and termed their actions as “haram”.

Middle East Forum: Unlike those nations, such as Saudi Arabia, that have eliminated Christianity altogether, Muslim countries with significant Christian minorities saw much persecution during the month of May: in Egypt, Christians were openly discriminated against in law courts, even as some accused the nation’s new president of declaring that he will “achieve the Islamic conquest of Egypt for the second time, and make all Christians convert to Islam”; in Indonesia, Muslims threw bags of urine on Christians during worship; in Kashmir and Zanzibar, churches were set aflame; and in Mali Christianity “faces being eradicated.” Elsewhere . . .

Religion Clause Blog: According to AP, Germany’s foreign minister Guido Westerwelle moved today to reassure critics after a controversial German court ruling last week held that young boys’ rights were infringed when parents decided to have them circumcised for religious reasons . . .

AP: Despite international condemnation, the radical Islamic faction controlling the northern Malian outpost of Timbuktu continued destroying the city’s ancient tombs on Monday, laying waste to the city’s five-hundred-year-old heritage.

Hawaii Reporter: Former Lt. Gov. James “Duke” Aiona will emcee the event, that also includes an extensive array of speakers, including Very Rev. Gary Secor (Vicar General from the Roman Catholic Diocese), Kahu Curt Kekuna (Kawaihao Church), Pastor Kuna Sepulveda (Word of Life Christian Center), Pastor Kelekona Bishaws (Real Life Christian Center), Dr. Russell Stewark (The Ark Christian Center), Jerry Coffee (Hanoi Hilton Survivor), Jim Hochberg (local Alliance Defense Fund attorney), Frtiz Rohlfing (Attorney and member of the LDS, Brad Dacus (founder of the Pacific Justice Institute), and Steven H. Aden (Alliance Defense Fund, Senior Legal Counsel).

AP: . . . the business and financial news agency published a report Friday detailing the multimillion-dollar assets of relatives of the man set to become the country’s next president.

AP: Palestinian spokesman Hanan Ashrawi said the vote was an affirmation of Palestinian sovereignty over the site which marks the place where Christians believe Jesus was born.

Catholic Culture: Observing that Americans had shown support for the “Arab Spring” uprisings in the region that have increased the dangers to the religious minority, he said that the best way to promote democracy would be to ensure that Christians have “the space of freedom.”

Christian Today: The concerns have prompted an estimated 100,000 Christians to leave Egypt since the uprising.

Religion Clause Blog: . . . Jewish congregations on Tuesday submitted an application to the European Court of Human Rights contending that Hungary’s new Church Law is illegal and discriminatory. Hungary’s Constitutional Court has already rejected their claims.

Religion Clause Blog: Reuters yesterday reported from Tunisia on the impact of a June 10 incident in which Islamists broke into the Printemps des Arts fair being held at Abdeliya Palace in Tunis and destroyed a few pieces of artwork to protest art they deemed insulting to Islam.

Christian Today: Christian Concern is in Strasbourg this week to raise awareness of religious freedom cases involving British Christians.

Catholic Culture: The Diocese of Calgary is under mounting pressure from Canadian activists to allow immunizations in Catholic schools to guard against a sexually transmitted disease.

Christian Today: Christians are calling for a new law to bring in accountability and transparency in church property transactions. The All India Catholic Union (AICU), a representative of the Catholic laity, has reiterated its demand for a law to govern church properties spread across the country.

Christian Today: A Catholic church in Mangalore was Monday attacked by a group of unidentified people in a presumed attempt to trigger communal conflict.

Christian Institute: Edinburgh City Council has scrapped the saying of prayers during council meetings and will replace them with a ten-minute “pause for reflection”. Critics warn that the decision is a deliberate “snub to Scotland’s Christian heritage”.

Philip Tartaglia at Public Discourse: One prominent response came from the Equality and Human Rights Commission Chief, Trevor Phillips, who said that religious beliefs end “at the door of the temple.” This was a far cry from the Prime Minister’s praise of the positive and essential role of Christianity in public life. But how can Christianity have a positive role in public life, one wonders, if it begins and ends at the door of the temple? And if religious freedom is limited to the interior of the temple, how different will Britain be from places like Saudi Arabia where there is freedom of worship behind closed doors? . . . So the view expressed by Trevor Phillips that religious faith should not be allowed to enter the public square raises huge questions about the nature of the state. Phillips appears to endorse the notion of a state that fills all civic space and reaches out to control other institutions present within the state. It is a notion of the state with a rather limited understanding of subsidiarity. It is Big Government at its worst. It appears to have no respect for institutions, such as the family and the Church, which pre-exist the state, which straddle the private-public domain, and which have their own internal constitution. This is a state moving toward a kind of soft totalitarianism.

Religion Clause Blog: In Keeton v. Anderson-Wiley, (SD GA, June 22, 2012), a Georgia federal district court, in a lengthy opinion, dismissed claims by a former graduate student in Augusta State University’s graduate counselor education program that her constitutional rights were infringed when she was dismissed for refusing to complete a required remediation plan.

One News Now: Dr. Charles McVety of Word TV is president of Canada Christian College in Toronto. He tells OneNewsNow he was attacked for preaching against “the radical sex agenda of the elites” and was forced off the air in 2011.

AP: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says she’s optimistic that relations with Moscow will not suffer despite planned legislation in Congress that would impose tough sanctions on Russian human rights violators.

Guardian: Mohamed Morsi’s first appointments as president-elect of Egypt will be a woman and a Coptic Christian, his spokesman has told the Guardian, as he moves to allay fears of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Independent: Protestant and Catholics from a Northern Ireland town devastated by an IRA bombing showed their unity today by joining forces to host a Diamond Jubilee visit by the Queen.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: . . . the Landgericht Köln (Cologne High Court), found in a recent judgment that the circumcision of a young boy at the request of his parents was an illegal assault against the boy’s bodily integrity, which, in principle, constitutes a punishable crime.

One News Now: “The Christians, they don’t have confidence in the Nigerian authorities, especially the military, to protect them; this is because the military is dominated by Muslims,” he tells OneNewsNow. “That is why International Christian Concern would like to ask the international communities, particularly the United States, to put pressure on the government of Nigeria and to protect the Christians who are being persecuted.”

AP: Ahmed Shafiq, Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister and loser of the presidential runoff, left Egypt Tuesday with most of his family for the United Arab Emirates hours after the prosecutor general opened an investigation into allegations he wasted public funds during his 8-year term as a civil aviation minister in the ousted regime.

WorldNetDaily: Saleha Mahmood Abedin, the mother of Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, reportedly served in the women’s division of the Muslim Brotherhood alongside the wife of Egypt’s new president, the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Mursi.

CNN has this report and video.

Daily Mail: Although optimists hope that Egypt will evolve along the lines of Turkey, which has a moderate Islamic government, the reality is that it is likely to see protracted strife between a still-powerful military – which has until now held all the power – and a strong Islamist movement that will make it more like strife-torn Pakistan.

Christianity Today: Meanwhile, at a Christian retreat center outside of Cairo, a number of Coptic women shed tears of despair over their community’s future, as they huddled around a television and watched Morsy be proclaimed the winner.

BillMuehlenberg: “To say or do anything whatsoever which the militant homosexual lobby finds unacceptable will turn you into a potential criminal, with your name forever placed on this government list. Are you hearing me? Do you fathom the incredibly ugly depth of all this?”

Google News (AP): A Tunisian appeals court upheld Monday the 7-year sentence for a man convicted of blasphemy for posting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad on Facebook.

UPI: Surveys of Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa indicate they mostly agree Islam should serve as a source of legislation but not be the only source.

The Hill: “The United States congratulates Dr. Mohamed Morsi on his victory in Egypt’s Presidential election, and we congratulate the Egyptian people for this milestone in their transition to democracy,” said White House press secretary Jay Carney in a statement.

Washington Times: Egyptian secular and liberal parties sounded dissatisfaction over the reported support of the US for Muslim Brotherhood’s presidential candidate, Mohamed Mursi, but affirmed they would accept the results of the elections due to be announced Sunday.

Al Jazeera (includes video): The Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi has officially won Egypt’s presidential election and will be the country’s next president, the electoral commission has announced. Morsi picked up 13.2 million votes out of just over 26 million, giving him about 51 per cent of the vote. His competitor, Ahmed Shafik, the final prime minister under Hosni Mubarak, received 12.3 million. More than 800,000 ballots were invalidated.

AP: Morsi, from the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood group, is the first Islamist president of Egypt. He defeated Mubarak’s last prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, in a tight race that deeply polarized the nation.

Herald Sun: The matters finally reached the Court of Appeal, where it was decided that bisexuals could claim vilification on homosexual grounds depending on the case. | Owen v Menzies & Ors; Bruce v Owen; Menzies v Owen [2012] QCA 170

Catholic Culture: Local officials in the Aceh Singkil Regency in Indonesia have closed 20 churches and will likely demolish them.

Christian Institute: Police in Lincolnshire have threatened to arrest an atheist who displayed a poster in a window saying, all “religions are fairy stories”. But The Christian Institute has joined with others in criticising the police’s actions as yet another example of misusing Section 5 of the Public Order Act.

AllAfrica.com: “We are troubled each time there is an attack on any church and every mosque prays against Boko Haram because what they are doing is not Islamic as Islam views the killing of one person as the killing of humanity,” a representative of the Jama’atu Nasril Islam (JNI) at the forum, Muazu Sani, said.

Times of Israel: ‘There is no God but Allah’ graffitied in the entrance hall of the building.

AP: Secret negotiations among dozens of countries preparing for a United Nations summit could lead to changes in a global treaty that would diminish the Internet’s role in economic growth and restrict the free flow of information.

AP: Egypt’s ruling military council on Friday blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for raising tensions by releasing presidential election results early – and defended decisions granting itself sweeping powers.

Christian Post: The Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram is allegedly planning to declare holy war on Southern Nigeria, where most Christians are concentrated, and might use food poisoning tactics to kill as many as possible, according to the chairman of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN).

Wall Street Journal: Australia is turning its back on religion. That’s the latest finding from a census completed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which shows more than one-fifth of the nation’s 21.5 million inhabitants now claim to follow no religion at all.

Volokh Conspiracy: A bookstore manager was charged in the Syariah High Court here with distributing a banned book by Canadian author Irshad Manji.

Religion Clause Blog: As reported by Radio Netherlands Worldwide and JTA, the Dutch Senate on Tuesday voted not to ratify a law that would have banned Jewish and Muslim ritual slaughter.

ADF Blog: lmost three years ago today, an unspeakable nightmare befell a loving innocent family simply because they wanted to educate their seven-year-old son from home.

Boston Globe (AP): Inside the besieged Syrian city of Homs, where hundreds of civilians are caught up in a fierce battle between rebels and government troops, a small group of Christians is making its own desperate pleas for safety.

Christian Post: A year ago Mohammed Khidir Khalil was glad his family had obtained refugee status in Egypt after fleeing Islamic hostilities in Sudan . . . Today the convert from Islam is back in Sudan fighting to recover his family after his in-laws compelled his wife to claim she was Muslim and divorce him.

How Appealing links to reports and the ruling. Religion Clause Blog links to the ruling and provides a brief summary.

Foreign Policy: Palestine, recognized last October as the 195th member state by the U.N. Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), recently launched its first initiative as a full-fledged government in the Paris-based agency, nominating the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem and a traditional pilgrimage route to be listed as an endangered site on the World Heritage List.

AP: A rescue official says more than 98 people have died since Sunday after a trio of church bombings sparked reprisals in northern Nigeria.

AP: Officials say up to 12 people have died in new communal clashes in western Myanmar.

Catholic Culture: Some 50 Hindu extremists attacked a tiny Christian village in the eastern Indian state of Orissa on June 15, beating a Protestant pastor and 20 residents.

Raymond Ibrahim at the Middle East Forum: But what does the Muslim Brotherhood have to benefit by claiming victory now, if official results might prove otherwise on June 21, a mere three days from now? Simple: they will be able to scream foul play—and gain the world’s sympathy. For days the world will have been inundated with news that the Brotherhood won, so that, when and if it hears that Shafiq won, it will naturally conclude electoral fraud—which best serves the Islamists’ interests.

DW.de: Three hundred years ago, the Germans developed a custom of hailing the conversion of Muslims to the Christian faith with public church ceremonies. Today, the Salafists are doing the same thing – but the other way round: They are filming the conversion of Germans to Islam and posting the videos on the Internet as a sign of the victory of the “only true religion.”

Reuters: That drew a sharp rebuke from Washington, long the Egyptian military’s financial sponsor. The Pentagon said it was “deeply concerned” and urged the army to hand over “full power” to civilians – but it made no mention of U.S. action if it did not.

BBC: Thousands of people are gathering in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to protest against a decision by the ruling military council to assume new powers.

LifeSiteNews: Moncton’s Crandall University, a Christian liberal arts school formerly known as Atlantic Baptist College, is in the crosshairs of homosexual rights activists who claim the school’s “Statement of Moral Standards” discriminates against homosexuals and is a violation of human rights.

LifeSiteNews: In what they are touting as a “world first,” a Quebec homosexual activist group has launched a “registry of homophobic acts” with support and funding from the Quebec Government’s Justice Department.

Spero Forum: The Greek-Catholic church of St. Elias in Qusayr, near the Syrian city of Homs, has been occupied by a group of insurgents who are fighting against the forces of President Bashar al-Assad’s government. The gunmen have established the church as their base of operations.

LifeSiteNews: Trustees of the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board voted this week to ban the distribution of Gideon Bibles in their schools, marking an end to a long tradition of giving grade 5 students, with parental consent, their own copy of the Scriptures.

LifeSiteNews: The U.S.-based Alliance Defense Fund and Home School Legal Defense Alliance are providing legal advice. “The government shouldn’t abduct and imprison children simply because it doesn’t like home schooling,” said ADF Legal Counsel Roger Kiska. “This family’s human rights have been unimaginably violated.”

AP: Islamist candidate Mohammed Morsi declared victory Monday in Egypt’s first free presidential election since Hosni Mubarak’s ouster 16 months ago.

One News Now: But now, says Roger Kiska of Alliance Defense Fund, the courts have finally sided with the family, stating the unanimous and extensive testimony of friends and family favoring Christer and Annie could not be ignored. “Social services has been evil, to put it in one word,” the attorney tells OneNewsNow . . . “… It’s happening in Germany, it’s now happening in Bulgaria — and when these things happen in Europe, they tend to make their down to the United States rather quickly,” warns Kiska. “There’s been a slew of bad precedent that the United States Supreme Court and state supreme courts have taken from Europe. So I think everyone needs to be aware.” [more]

L. Gordon Crovitz at the Wall Street Journal: It’s easy to understand why countries like Russia, China and Iran would want to rewire the Internet, cutting off access to their citizens and undermining the idea of a World Wide Web. What’s more surprising is that U.S. diplomats are letting authoritarian regimes hijack an obscure U.N. agency to undermine how the Internet works, including for Americans.

The Church Report: Suicide bombers killed 21 people in attacks on three churches in Nigeria during Sunday services, exacerbating religious tensions in a West African nation that is almost evenly divided between Muslims and Christians

HSLDA on the Christian Newswire: ADF Legal Counsel Roger Kiska says the family’s human rights have been unimaginably violated. “The government shouldn’t abduct and imprison children simply because it doesn’t like home schooling,” said ADF Legal Counsel Roger Kiska. “We …

AP: A radical Islamist sect on Monday claimed responsibility for Sunday’s suicide attacks at two churches in the city of Zaria and another in the city of Kaduna that left 21 people dead, according to an initial count.

Christian Concern: The General Medical Council’s Investigation Committee has today (14 June) reprimanded a Christian doctor for sharing his faith with a patient at the end of a private consultation.

Voice of America: Tempers flared and protesters took to the streets after Egypt’s constitutional court issued twin rulings that sparked anger and confusion just days ahead of a presidential run-off election.