The cause of Christians striving to practise their faith without fear or pressure often advances and retreats in countries outside those where Christians directly live under the most oppression. In London, New York, Strasbourg, Washington, and other centres of deliberation, important developments happen concerning Christians and religious freedom more broadly. This is the page where we consolidate news with an international scope.

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COVID-19 exacerbates discrimination against minority Christians globally

Christian prays during COVID-19, Cairo

• Christians refused coronavirus aid in countries from India to Yemen to West Africa • COVID-19 legitimises increased surveillance and restrictions by authoritarian governments • Organised criminal groups use virus as means to extend their control, including over churches • Nationalism driven by majority religious identity rises in countries such […]

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Church surveillance, COVID-19 controls affect China’s Christians – 1 of 5 global trends

Chinese woman, phone in hand, 2020

                  The emergency that dominated the globe during the past year — the novel coronavirus — also dominated the countries of the World Watch List published by Open Doors International today (Jan 13) and the lives of the estimated 340 million Christians […]

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UN Sec. General’s “biggest data gap in the world” affects persecuted Christian women

Women to women conference in Ethiopia, February 2018.

The UN Secretary-General last week called it ‘the biggest data gap in the world…what UK writer Caroline Criado Perez calls “default man” thinking: the unquestioned assumption that men are standard, and women the exception. Very often, women are not counted, and their experiences don’t count”. And this lack of ‘counting’ […]

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From sub-Saharan Africa to China, Christians experience ‘high’ levels of persecution

Poster memorials and crosses for Christians who died in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Easter Sunday, 2019

• In Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday more than 250 people, 45 of them children, were killed in attacks on three churches and hotels; more than 500 people were injured. • Bombs killed 20 at a Catholic church in Jolo in the southern Philippines. • In China, state-sanctioned and ‘underground’ […]

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Christians in Africa face ‘explosion’ in violence, senior church leader says

Church leaders as well as government officials and representatives of the Muslim community attended the funeral of the six killed in the Dablo attack. (Photo: World Watch Monitor)

Violence against Christians in Africa “is exploding”, according to a senior church leader in the Central African Republic. In Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Mozambique there has been an increase in attacks on Christians, including church leaders and churches in recent weeks, said Cardinal Dieudonne Nzapalainga in an interview with the […]

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For persecuted Christian women, violence is compounded by ‘shaming’

Women to women conference in Ethiopia, February 2018.

It would be hard to argue the world is unaware that Islamic State fighters used rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war against Iraq’s Yazidi women: Nadia Murad shared the 2018 Nobel Prize after she told the world of her personal ordeal at their hands. However, testimonies from […]

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