World in Brief

A court in Oran, Algeria has upheld a five-year prison sentence for a Christian convicted of reposting a cartoon of Islam’s prophet on his Facebook account. It also confirmed his fine of 100,000 dinars (US$750).

The man’s attorney, Farid Khemisti, said the 43-year-old father of four young children appeared to have received the heavy sentence because he was a Christian. He said: ‘I really hoped for a reduction in the sentence, to at worst, six months in prison. But my client being a Christian did not make it any easier.’

A mob armed with axes and thick wooden batons in central India has disrupted a Methodist home-worship service and beat and threatened Christians for leaving their ancestral tribal religion.

Eight Christians were injured and five were hospitalised. They included two women and Pastor Samson Baghel, who suffered head injuries and a dislocated shoulder, in the assault in Surguda village, Bastar District in Chhattisgarh state. Twenty Christians from surrounding areas had attended the meeting, with the only three Christian families who live in Surguda.

A father who has long objected to his underage daughter taking testosterone as part of an experimental gender transition has been jailed in British Columbia for contempt of court.

Robert Hoogland was arrested after a warrant was issued by a judge earlier in March for telling the public his name and showing his face. He will remain in police custody pending a decision on his release by the British Columbia Supreme Court in Vancouver. His attorney will argue that the detention is unlawful and he should be released.

Switzerland will become the fifth European country to ban face coverings such as Islamic niqabs. 51.2% of the population voted for a resolution to make it mandatory for all citizens to show their faces in public, despite the opposition of both the Swiss parliament and government to the initiative.

Face coverings will continue to be allowed in places of worship. Other exceptions will include covering one’s face when there are adverse weather conditions, or during traditional festivals such as carnival.

‘My biggest joy is that I now can afford education for my children,’ says Odette. She lives in a remote village in Bubanza province, Burundi.

Odette is a beneficiary of a Christian agency, Hauge Micro Finance, helping people start up new small businesses. The agency says: ‘We say that everything we do, we do to improve the livelihoods of the rural poor people in Burundi. And to glorify Jesus by using our God-given talents as for God (Col. 3.23). Not handouts, but hand-ups. Not giving out fish, but teaching people how to fish. Not short-term but long-term.’

The body of Swiss evangelical missionary Beatrice Stockli, who had been held captive by Islamist extremists in Mali since 2016, has been found and identified.

Stockli’s body was given to Malian authorities by the Red Cross and a DNA test confirmed that it is of the Christian woman, who had been kidnapped from Mali’s Timbuktu city by the jihadist group Jama’at Nusrat Al-Islam wa’l-Muslimin.

‘Sadly, we now have definitive evidence that Beatrice is dead,’ said a spokesperson for the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs.

Zhang Chunlei, an elder of Love (Ren’ai) Reformed Church in Guiyang in China’s Guizhou province, has been placed in criminal detention after a police raid.

Local police and officials from the Religious Affairs Bureau stormed a private property in Guiyang where a group of Christians were holding a retreat, taking ten people to a police station.

Mr Zhang went to the police station to make inquiries, whereupon he was arrested and his home raided. He has since been criminally detained.

Twenty-four Christians, including two ministers, have been attacked and killed by armed militants in western Ethiopia in March. The Christians were attending a church service in Horo Guduru Welega zone on the eve of Ethiopian Lent.

Local sources said members of the militant group OLF Shenie surrounded the church and forced members of the congregation to hand over their mobile phones. The armed men then killed the two ministers outside the church, before taking the other Christians to a nearby forest where they too were killed.

Armed Hindu extremists in Madhya Pradesh, central India, disrupted worship services at two churches recently, beat congregation members and pressured police to arrest more than 20 Christians on suspicion of forcible conversion.

Under a new anti-conversion law, police in Alirajpur District charged one of the two churches’ pastors with forcible conversion.

Pastor Malsingh Meda and 21 members of his village church were arrested, as was Pastor Dilipsingh Vasunia, who leads a church in another village. Meda was later released, while Vasunia was charged with forcible conversion and then bailed.

A Pakistani Christian boy accused of blasphemy for sharing a Facebook post which ‘defamed and disrespected’ the sacred mosque in Mecca has been granted bail after four years in prison.

Nabeel Masih was 16 when first arrested in 2016. In 2018 he received a ten-year sentence, the youngest Christian convicted under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, which are frequently abused as a way to settle scores.

His lawyer successfully argued that there was no evidence that the post had come from the then-teenager.

A total of 99,948 unborn babies were aborted in Germany in 2020.

The figure has been published by the Federal Agency for Statistics. The number is slightly down on each of the previous three years, when over 100,000 abortions were performed. Only 4% of abortions in 2020 were for medical or criminal reasons. The great majority of women who terminated their pregnancies (71%) were aged between 18 and 34 years old, 19% were between 35 and 39, and 8% were 40 or older. Minors who aborted represented 3%.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has formally dismissed the controversial Trump-era Commission on Unalienable Rights, which sought to elevate the promotion of religious freedom worldwide.

Blinken, who vowed to promote LGBT rights worldwide during his confirmation hearings, only briefly alluded to religious persecution in a recent press conference unveiling the 45th State Department country reports on human rights practices.

The annual human rights reports cover internationally recognised individual, civil, political and worker rights outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international agreements in nearly 200 countries and territories.