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 . . . Read More

IS ‘won’t escape justice’ after Trump signs genocide accountability act

US President Donald Trump signs the "Iraq and Syria Genocide Relief and Accountability Act of 2018" in the presence of, among others, Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil, Iraq (l). (Photo: Getty)
US President Donald Trump has signed into law a bill that will help to ensure aid is provided to Islamic State’s victims in Iraq and Syria and to hold the perpetrators accountable, reports Associated Press (AP). “In recent years, IS has committed horrifying atrocities against religious and ethnic minorities in Syria . . . Read More

UK parliamentary group calls out 27 countries for ‘significant’ religious freedom violations

A church in Bartella, a town near the Iraqi city of Mosul, after Islamic State militants left the area in October 2016. (Photo: World Watch Monitor)
A “Commentary on the Current State of Freedom of Religion or Belief” presented by a group of British parliamentarians today, 10 December, highlights 27 countries where people’s religious freedom has been denied and abused in the past year. The report, presented by the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for International . . . Read More

70 years since universal declaration, human rights ‘ignored and abused all over the world’

Ahok protests
Ahead of the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on Monday, 10 December, rights group ADF International has called for “recommitment” to the founding principles, which it says are being “consistently ignored and abused … all over the world”. Chief among those rights, ADF notes, is the . . . Read More

‘Next time we will not survive’ – Middle East Christian refugee

Boy outside a tent in a refugee camp in Lebanon. (Photo: World Vision)
As many as 80% of Syria’s Christians have left their country since the start of the civil war in 2011, while 50% of Iraq’s Christians have been uprooted since 2006, according to a report produced by Christian charities Open Doors International, Served and Middle East Concern last year, which said the . . . Read More

‘UN must recognise persecution of Christians in Middle East as genocide’

At the moment of the photo taken, ISIS had just been pushed out of the home towns of these Christians. People were hoping and anticipating to return to their towns some day.
The European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ) is appealing to the United Nations to recognise the persecution of Christians in Iraq and Syria as “genocide”, reports the US-based National Review. The ECLJ, an affiliate of the American Center for Law and Justice, said a “genocide” declaration is necessary to . . . Read More

Attacks against Copts ‘among deadliest acts of religious persecution’ – report

This is one of the fifty five photos that is part of the photo story "Renewed day by day," commissioned by World Watch Monitor, exploring the extensive damage to churches in Egypt's Minya region that took place in late August 2013.
Attacks by members of the Islamic State group against Egypt’s Coptic Christian community “were among the deadliest acts of religious persecution” last year, according a new report presented in Washington DC yesterday, 13 September. “Fifty-three per cent of ISIS attacks against the public in 2017 were aimed at the Coptic . . . Read More