In Depth:  World Watch Monitor

A pastor in Tajikistan sentenced to three years in prison for ‘singing extremist songs in church and so inciting religious hatred’ was freed three months early in December.

Bakhrom Kholmatov, 42, was sentenced in July 2017 after being arrested by the National Security Committee (NSC, also known as the secret police).

Six months after authorities in Ethiopia’s northern region of Amhara told the Ethiopian Fellowship of Evangelical Students it could no longer operate in the town of Debark and ordered them to move 80 km southwest, the police arrested students and a church leader there in early November.

Police pressured students in the group to sign an agreement never to gather in Debark, then released them. Seven church leaders were detained for three days, then released after they had signed a similar agreement.

Criminal investigations into the stabbing to death of a Korean Christian at the end of November are continuing under a cloak of judicial secrecy, as authorities search for evidence to resolve the controversy over the killer’s motive.

South Korean Jin-Wook Kim, 41, was murdered in a late-night attack on the streets of Diyarbakir (southeast Turkey’s largest city), while walking alone in a small alley near his home in the city’s impoverished Baglar district. Bleeding heavily from two deep stab wounds to his heart and a third in his back, Kim stumbled onto a nearby street, where passers-by alerted the police and called an ambulance.

Friends of a man who converted from Islam believe his death on 4 October was linked to numerous threats he received from his family that they would kill him for his change of faith.

Amr Hussein Mohamed El-Sayeh had been reported for apostasy by his uncle. Someone who saw his body at the hospital noted bruising around his neck and face which do not fit with the official verdict of death by electrocution. Also, his body wasn’t ritually washed for burial. This is thought to be because he had a tattoo of a cross on his wrist which would have caused his family to treat him as an apostate.

At least ten Christians were killed on 12 and 13 May as a spate of attacks on churches continued in northern Burkina Faso.

The attacks came two weeks after gunmen raided a Protestant church in Sirgadji village in the north-eastern province of Soum. Since February two other pastors have lost their lives in different attacks. Elie Zoré, 48, leader of the Assemblies of God Church of Bouloutou, near the main town of Arbinda in the far north, in the province of Soun, was killed in April.

Gunmen who attacked a Protestant church on 28 April asked the pastor and five others to convert to Islam before killing them.

Pastor Pierre Ouédraogo, 80, and other members were chatting in the church yard. Around 1pm a dozen armed men arrived on motorbikes to storm the place.

A Colombian pastor was shot dead as he left his church on 9 February.

Pastor Leider Molina, 24, had just finished preaching in his church in Caucasia, Antioquia state in northwest Colombia, when he was hit by five bullets.

The criminal case against Pastor Andrew Brunson has triggered a significant increase in public hate speech against the nation’s small Protestant community, creating what its church leaders called, in late February, a ‘climate of insecurity’ for its congregations and individual members.

According to the Turkish Association of Protestant Churches’ annual human-rights report for 2018, the number of attacks designed to incite hatred of Protestants ‘purely due to their beliefs’ in Turkey’s local, national and social media outlets had seriously increased during Brunson’s arrest, jailing and two-year trial.

For what might be the first time, a Pakistani lower court in mid-January acquitted a Christian of blasphemy, after a three-year trial, for lack of evidence against him.

However, before his arrest on the false charge, Pervaiz Masih’s wife was brutally tortured by the police as they sought to find out where he was, as was his brother-in-law. Her back was broken, leaving her unable to leave her bed. He also believes his wife Zareena’s incapacity led to the drowning of his three-and-a-half year old daughter; she was unable to keep watch over the toddler.

Jakarta’s former governor, known as Ahok, who was sentenced to two years in jail for blasphemy against Islam, was due to be released from prison on 24 January, four months ahead of schedule.

The ethnic Chinese Christian, whose real name is Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, should have been released in May but has been granted early release.

Turkish immigration authorities refused to permit Canadian-American Christian David Byle to enter Turkey on 20 November when he returned to Istanbul’s Sabiha Gokcen airport after being deported in October.

After living and ministering in Turkey for the past 19 years, the 49-year-old evangelist was told by police officials on his arrival that a permanent re-entry ban had been filed against him, forbidding him to ever return to the country.

Violence in the Central African Republic peaked on 15 November as dozens were killed in the small south-east town of Alindao.

Armed men believed to be members of UPC, a mainly Muslim and Fulani militia, stormed the cathedral and the nearby refugee camp hosting more than 26,000 people displaced following previous attacks in the town and its surrounding villages.

The Christian woman who lost the right side of her face in a bomb attack on her church in Cairo in 2016 flew to Germany for a complicated operation to rebuild her face, it was reported in November.

Samiha Tawfiq will first undergo some medical tests, but it is hoped the life-changing reconstruction will begin in December.

David Byle, a Canadian-American Christian, was arrested on 13 October and detained overnight by security police, then ordered to leave, flying back to the USA on 25 October.

He had been in a long-term dispute over his visa renewal. Although renewal requests were repeatedly declined or left unanswered, various criminal charges against him were eventually dropped by local courts, bowing to national laws defining missionary activities as legal and confirming that the Christian literature he distributed did not slander Islam.

The Sudanese Government returned ownership of 19 properties to the Sudanese Church of Christ (SCOC) on 24 September, two years after it confiscated them.

In August a Sudanese court ruled against the government and ordered that administration of properties be returned to the church body and that the case against five SCOC church leaders be dropped.

Amnesty International launched an Urgent Action in the summer calling for the release of four Iranians sentenced to a combined total of 45 years in prison ‘solely for practising their Christian faith’.

The report calls for urgent action from the Iranian Government to ‘quash the convictions and sentences of [the four who] were targeted solely for the peaceful exercise of their rights to freedoms of religion and belief, expression, and association, through their Christian faith.’

A Mexican pastor who survived an assassination attempt in the notorious border city of Juarez in June said he was targeted because his church’s work is seen to negatively impact upon the efforts of drug cartels.

A hitman entered the pastor’s home, making him kneel down on the floor and telling him ‘you don’t know who you are messing about with’. The man then pulled the trigger on his gun, but it failed to fire, so he knocked the pastor unconscious and stole his wallet before fleeing.

Restrictions on religion around the world continued to climb in 2016, reported a 138page document by the Washington-based Pew Research Center into global restrictions on religion in 2016, in July.

2016 is the most recent year for which data was available for the 198 countries and territories surveyed.

More than 8,000 churches in Rwanda have been closed by the government after they failed to meet requirements laid down earlier this year, it was revealed in July.

en previously reported that 700 churches had their activities suspended on 1 March, as a result of the restrictive new law.

In July, a Czech aid worker who spent over a year in a Sudan prison said that he counted his experience a ‘privilege’ because it enabled him to share his Christian faith with other prisoners.

Petr Jašek also praised the country’s ‘very courageous’ Christian minority. He said that two Sudanese Christians, who were arrested days after him, have been resettled in the US since their release in May 2017. A third has been released and remains in Sudan.

A Burkina Faso pastor and seven other Christians reportedly released by their kidnappers in June are in fact still in captivity.

Pastor Pierre Boéna was kidnapped by armed men on 3 June – alongside his younger son, daughter-in-law, two grandsons, a member of his church and her two twin daughters – in the village of Bilhoré near the Mali border.

A church that is home to many former Muslims was ordered to cease its Sunday worship in June.

Services at the church, which is led by a convert from Islam, were interrupted twice in the Spring by a group of people consisting of local officials, representatives of the Prosecutor’s office and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, assistants to the local imam and former colleagues from the school at which the pastor used to teach.

A newly-implemented directive from the Chinese Government in June forces Protestant ‘house churches’ and Catholic ‘underground’ communities to seek ‘guidance’ from recognised religious organisations.

A notification from the State Administration for Religious Affairs requires organisers of religious activities at temporary sites to also apply for a permit that is valid for three years.

Christian groups welcomed a surprise announcement by a nationalist chief minister of a state in north-east India that he will ensure that a law preventing conversions from one faith to another is repealed, it was reported in July.

Pema Khandu, a Buddhist and chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh, told an audience that he would have the 1978 Freedom of Religion Act repealed in the next session of the Legislative Assembly.

Three churches closed down by authorities in Algeria’s northern province of Oran were told in June they could reopen.

Rachid Seghir, the pastor at the main church of Oran city, said he was called to the police station, so informed church members. At the police station, Pastor Seghir was handed a notification to sign. ‘It was hard to believe, as I was not expecting such a positive surprise!’ said Pastor Seghir, who could barely hide his emotions. ‘Honestly, I have not understood anything that happened: I had read the notification and understood it correctly, but I remained amazed. “Maybe it’s just a trap,” I thought.’

Almost 7,000 people belonging to the largely Christian minority group in Kachin, northern Myanmar, have fled their houses since fighting between the army and a rebel group flared up in early April, according to recent figures from the Red Cross.

‘It’s a war where civilians are being systematically targeted by members of Burma Army … [yet] the international community chooses to overlook it,’ political analyst and writer Stella Naw told the Guardian newspaper, with international attention on Myanmar focused on the humanitarian crisis facing the country’s Rohingya Muslims.

The organisation linking 45 Protestant churches, l’Eglise Protestante d’Algérie (EPA), called on the Algerian Government on 18 May to lift its measure for closing down churches, and to give equal treatment under the Maghreb country’s constitution.

‘As full citizens, we call on the highest authorities in the country to ensure that all the fundamental rights of the citizen are protected, regardless of their religious affiliation’, said EPA in a statement.

Seventy-four children had to leave their Christian-run hostel in Rajasthan in early May, after the High Court dismissed a petition challenging the child welfare committee’s seizure of the central office of Emmanuel Mission India.

Emmanuel Mission International (EMI), founded in 1960 by Archbishop M.A. Thomas, is well-known for providing quality education to students from under-resourced backgrounds, regardless of caste or religion. EMI now runs five societies. One, Emmanuel Education Society, runs over 40 schools in Rajasthan state.

People in the battle-scarred Southern Philippines city of Marawi are trying to rebuild their homes and lives one year after the place was stormed by Islamist militants.

In May 2017, militants belonging to the Maute group, an affiliate of Islamic State, took over Marawi. In the following five months of fighting between the militants and government forces, 40% of the city was destroyed and 98% of the population displaced. Militants entered homes and set buildings on fire, including a cathedral and a Protestant-run college.

Amid growing extreme Hindu nationalism in India, dozens of speakers called for concerted action to uphold the country’s constitution and fundamental rights, at a conference on 25–27 May, to mark four years of government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

‘There is a grave threat to plurality,’ Professor Ganesh Narayan Devy, a scholar on India’s religious and linguistic diversity, told the Citizens’ Conclave on ‘Building an Inclusive India’ in New Delhi, attended by over 800 delegates from across the country. ‘We are living at a time when you are branded as anti-national for expressing a different view [contrary to Hindu nationalism],’ said Devy.

The head of Egypt’s Protestant Church said in April that he urges clergy not to take part in ‘reconciliation sessions’ that aim to resolve community conflicts without the involvement of the police and legal system.

The Rev Dr Andrea Zaki said he ‘strongly’ opposed the scheme because it renders the law ‘absent’.

In April, it was announced that there would be a ban on online Bible sales and Christian books in China.

Important books for other major religions, such as the Qur’an and Buddhist sutras, were not taken down and are available online in China, and the Qur’an has a Chinese ISBN number, whilst the Bible does not.

Andrew Brunson, an American pastor of a small Protestant church in Turkey, told a court in April and May he denies any wrong doing as he stands accused of supporting the attempted 2016 coup of the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

If convicted, the 50-year-old Brunson faces 35 years in prison. The case was adjourned until 18 July and Brunson was sent back to the prison where he was first sent. Although only spending ten days there in May, it was in solitary confinement and is a facility where nearly two dozen inmates are held in a cell designed for eight.

On 1 March, Rwanda ordered 700 churches in Kigali Province to suspend activities because of concerns over health and safety.

Under a newly proposed law the churches are expected to meet ‘basic requirements in terms of safety, hygiene, infrastructure and legality’, Justus Kangwagye, a Government official, said.

On 7 March, police in Nigeria’s north east Adamawa State arrested the organiser of a protest march against the continued killings of predominantly Christian farmers by mainly Muslim Fulani herdsmen.

Mijah Stanley had called on ‘all pro-democracy and civil rights organisations, faith-based and community-based organisations, as well as other Nigerians’ to rally. However, the march never went ahead after police spokesperson S.P. Othman Abubakar warned they would be arrested and prosecuted.

On 24 March, an Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC) in Lahore, acquitted 20 men suspected of involvement in the murder of a Christian couple burnt alive at the kiln where they worked in November 2014 after it was alleged that they had set fire to some pages from a Qur’an.

Previously, in April 2016, the ATC allowed the kiln’s owner, Yousuf Gujjar, to walk free. The same court in November 2016 sentenced five men to death and jailed another eight men for two years.

A Pakistani Christian sentenced to death for blasphemy nearly two years ago was acquitted on 13 March.

The case against him – brought by a police officer whose protection he sought against two blackmailers – was ‘clearly fabricated’, his lawyer said.

A joint commission of Turkey’s major Christian denominations published an historic book of concise Christian doctrine in February.

It received the unprecedented endorsement of all the nation’s Orthodox, Catholic, Armenian, Syriac and Protestant Churches.

On 19 March, an Ethiopian court turned down the appeal of an Evangelical Christian sentenced to seven months in prison for ‘causing outrage to religious peace and feeling’.

Temesgen Mitiku Mezemir, 24, the leader of an Evangelical fellowship group, was found guilty of defaming the tabot, a replica of the tablets of the law sacred to Orthodox Christians.

For many Christian families in Qaraqosh, Easter was particularly special, as they celebrated it at home for the first time since fleeing the city in 2014.

The city, located in northern Iraq’s Nineveh Plains, was occupied by the Islamic State group for over three years before its liberation in October 2017.

The EU’s Special Envoy for Freedom of Religion or Belief, Jan Figel, told Pakistani officials on 16 February that the renewal of their export privileges to Europe depends on the release of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman on death row for blasphemy since 2010.

‘The EU countries have started believing that Pakistan’s Supreme Court, appeasing certain political and fundamental forces of Pakistan, is intentionally delaying the hearing of Asia Bibi,’ an EU press release stated. It added that the renewal of Pakistan’s GPS Plus trading status will be linked to the outcome of her case.

Two Christians were whipped in public on 27 February in Banda Aceh, the capital of the Sumatran province of Aceh, as a crowd took photos and jeered.

Dahlan Sili Tongga, 61, and Tjia Nyuk Hwa, 45, were punished for breaking Sharia law by playing a game at a children’s entertainment centre, which the authorities judged to be tantamount to gambling. Tongga and Hwa were whipped six and seven times respectively.

Sexual slavery practised by Islamic State (IS) jihadists is condoned in literature that is available at Islamic institutions and should be burnt, a leading imam in France said in March.

Hocine Drouiche, vice president of the Conference of Imams of France and an imam in Nimes, said that the ideology behind the sex-slave market set up in Mosul, Iraq, during its occupation by IS could be found in books published or stocked by Islamic universities that contained justifications for the rape of women and girls ‘because they are not Muslims’. Dr Drouiche faced criticism from some French imams for saying political Islam and terrorism are linked.

There was hope among Iranian Christians that the mass protests earlier in 2018 could effect change for them, but they continue to be harassed and imprisoned on spurious charges.

An Iranian convert to Christianity, Naser Navard Gol-Tapeh, who recently lost his appeal against a ten-year sentence for ‘missionary activities’, was reportedly moved to the infamous Evin Prison in Tehran, the same prison where two other Christians, Majidreza Souzanchi Kushani and Fatimeh Mohammadi (both members of the self-styled Church of Iran), have also been held since their arrest on 17 November 2017.

A Nigerian university student who converted from Islam to Christianity has been arrested by state security forces, as has the man who introduced her to Christianity, according to reports in mid-January.

Nabila Umar Sanda, 19, is a student at Bingham University in Karu, which is owned by one of Nigeria’s major churches. While studying there, she became friends with Simput Dafup, a Christian, who, once she expressed an interest in Christianity, invited her to meet a local church leader, Jeremiah Datim.

Almost a year after Raymond Koh went missing (in February 2017), with no investigation progress, a human rights inquiry was told by the police that a man had been charged with Koh’s kidnap.

The country’s Human Rights Commission then had to halt its scrutiny because the law says it cannot hold an inquiry when court proceedings against a suspect are activated.

Amnesty International reported in January that fighter jets sent by the Nigerian Air Force fired rockets at villages where Fulani herdsmen were attacking Christian residents and were responsible for at least 35 deaths.

The Nigerian Air Force confirmed that jets were dispatched in December, but said they were instructed to fire only ‘warning shots’ to deter spiralling communal violence.

A Christian woman was brutally attacked with a machete by her Muslim husband for refusing to convert to his religion, with the attack leading to the death of the woman’s one-week-old twins, it was reported in early February.

Regina Navatovu lived with her husband, Asuman Sekidde, in Bumogolo village in south Uganda. When Navatovu conceived in 2017, Sekidde claimed the children were not his and accused his wife of having an affair. Sekidde had started to threaten to hurt his wife before moving to Kalangala, more than 100km away, in Lake Victoria.

All religious establishments in China will be bound by the new Regulations for Religious Affairs that came into force on 1 February amid reports that Christians are being sent to ‘re-education’ camps to re-orientate people to be loyal to the communist ideology.

More than 100 Christians have been sent to ‘re-education’ camps in China’s north-western Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the past few months.

Threatened by Islamists when they heard about his work at a church in Djalloube, central Mali, Sory* fled, leaving his family traumatised.

‘I started to face serious problems when the Islamists heard about me and the conversion of some of the people [from Islam to Christianity],’ Sory says. ‘They sent me warnings through friends, telling me to stop talking about Jesus or risk getting killed. They said they knew it was easy to kill Christians because [Christians] don’t have any weapons. They can simply be slaughtered.’

Christianity started spreading among the Hmong in the highlands of northwest and central Vietnam in the late 1980s, through a Hmong-language Christian radio programme broadcast from Manila. This has led to a remarkable religious transformation in the past three decades.

Among the 1million Hmong there are now an estimated 400,000 Christians, and the social, economic, and political impacts of religious change – from persecution and migration to lifestyle changes and new gender relations – are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

Large crowds attended the funeral of 14-year-old Christian, Ishak Nashaat Birwan, on 21 December at the Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Izziyah village the day after his body was found.

He had disappeared 11 days before, and his body was found in a canal near where he lived in a large Christian village near Manfalout in Asyut. Samir Fekry, Ishak’s cousin, said the body was taken to the morgue for a post-mortem. ‘Ishak’s body had no eyes and there were signs of torture on different parts of his body,’ he said. The hospital is yet to issue the Forensic Medicine Report which establishes the cause of death.

Copts in the town of Kom El-Loufy, 250 km south of Cairo, started the construction of a church in late December, 12 years after their previous building was closed.

Ever since their previous building was closed the Coptic community of 1,600 people in Kom El-Loufy has experienced fierce opposition from their Muslim neighbours. Some locals set fire to four Coptic homes in July last year, suspecting that a newly-built house would be turned into a church.

A vandalism attack on 24 November in Turkey’s south-eastern city of Malatya damaged a small Turkish Protestant church.

The assault came just two days after the targeting of 13 minority Alevi families in a nearby neighbourhood.

There is a sense of emergency in the Central African Republic (CAR) where security has dramatically deteriorated across the country: President Faustin-Archange Touadéra failed to establish his authority beyond the capital, Bangui, 18 months after his election.

Gunmen are at crossroads in broad daylight, in a neighbourhood near the international airport. At night, gunshots can still be heard in the capital. In the capital, businesses and schools are working fairly well. In one of the epicentres of the violence, PK5, a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood, markets and shops have re-opened (CAR is 76% nominally Christian, 14% nominally Muslim).

Conservative MPs within Iran’s Parliament are proposing that Iranians should only be allowed to vote for members of their own religious group.

In Iran, where 90-95% of the population is Shia Muslim, this will essentially mean that it will be impossible for members of religious minorities to be elected.

A woman who founded a work supporting Iraqi refugees in 2014, has seen the organisation grow to support almost 2,500 refugees in the last year.

Al-Hadaf (The Purpose) is an NGO run with the help of volunteers from Jordanian churches. It offers a boutique for secondhand clothes, a room for trauma workshops and training, and an art-therapy room for children. It also runs health clinics.

A Malaysian Christian woman’s campaign for Christians’ right to use the word ‘Allah’ for ‘God’ resumed in Malaysia’s High Court on 19 October.

Jill Ireland began campaigning for Christians’ right to use the word ever since immigration officials at a Kuala Lumpur airport seized eight Christian CDs from her in May 2008 because the CDs used the word Allah in a Christian context. Ireland maintained that the court had failed to address her constitutional right as a Christian to use the word despite returning the CDs.

In early October, American pastor Andrew Brunson thanked everyone for advocating and praying for him as he began his second year as a prisoner in Turkey.

Charges against him include spying, and recently Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan confirmed publicly that Brunson is being held as a political hostage.

The King of Bahrain sought to promote his country as a global champion of religious tolerance, with a declaration in mid-September that advocated freedom of religion for all and a rejection of extremism.

In the Bahrain Declaration, King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa ‘unequivocally reject[s] compelled observance’. The one-page pledge, which was co-sponsored by the Jewish US-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, also calls for the condemnation of terrorism, of stirring up extremism, of suicide bombing and of sexual slavery.

Ruth, in her late 30s, with three children, although not imprisoned herself, has a church leader husband who is in jail.

As she talked about life as a Christian single mother in Africa’s most repressive state, it was initially difficult for her to speak openly. Words come hesitantly, carefully considered. But then, as she relaxed, she was almost eager to talk about things kept inside for so long.

Photographs released by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in the summer showing large quantities of confiscated Christian materials were a ‘publicity stunt’ that reflected the Iranian regime’s fear of Christianity, according to a religious freedom advocate Mansour Borji.

Borji, from advocacy group Article 18 said that the photographs were meant as a deterrent to stop Christians from meeting over the summer months, and demonstrated the regime’s ‘disrespect’ for religious freedom, despite its claims to the contrary.

Hannah Cho* tells her story of faith in God despite horrendous persecution.

After the Korean war, public religion was discouraged. The local church was turned into a school and Hannah remembers that her Christian mother prayed at home while the family kept watch for informants.

Azamat became a Christian in the early days of Uzbekistan’s independence, soon after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, when, he says, the country ‘was a much freer place than it is now’.

Azamat, now in his 40s with a wife and two children, talks about his long-running battle to keep his church going under severe oppression from the authorities.

An Ethiopian Christian suffered deep wounds to the back of his head when he was attacked while alone in his home by a group of local Muslims with machetes on 16 July.

The attack left the 27-year-old man needing life-saving surgery. The man – who, for security reasons, cannot be named – was attacked in Hirna, a rural town 400km east of Addis Ababa. His local clinic referred him to the hospital in nearby Asebeteferi, who in turn sent him to Adama, where a doctor operated on his wounds. Although he is still unwell, the surgery stabilised him enough to be taken elsewhere for more specialised treatment.

Trauma counsellors are helping women and children in northern Nigeria to deal with severe psychosocial consequences following conflict which has left 2.7 million people traumatised.

A charity helping Christians persecuted because of their faith is about to expand. A new building, opening later in 2017, will provide a residential centre to help those needing more intense treatment. The charity says it will be big enough to accommodate 30 people and have a training facility to meet the growing need for counsellors. It built a similar facility in Iraq to help the victims of the Islamic State group, and the service has also helped victims of the conflict with Fulani herdsmen in Nigeria’s Middle Belt states.

A pastor imprisoned in south-east Vietnam was further punished in early June for telling a visiting US diplomatic delegation about abuses he has suffered.

Nguyen Cong Chinh, serving an 11-year sentence for ‘undermining national solidarity’ by religious activities with ethnic groups in the Central Highlands, met US consular officials in Ho Chi Minh City.

Kifayat Maharramova was fined on 1 May for selling religious literature without the required approval from the State Committee for Work with Religious Organisations.

Police seized 58 books and 16 CDs from her shop in Gyanja, Azerbaijan’s second city. Earlier in 2017, two booksellers in the capital, Baku, failed to overturn similar fines on appeal.

A Pakistani Christian boy accused of blasphemy for ‘liking’ and ‘sharing’ a Facebook post which ‘defamed and disrespected’ the Kaaba in Mecca – the building at the centre of Islam’s most sacred mosque – was again refused bail in May.

In February, 16-year-old Nabeel Masih was refused bail by a local magistrate, despite his lawyers’ insistence that, as a child with no prior convictions, he should be released. The Districts and Sessions judge Naveeb Iqbal came to the same decision, saying that the boy committed a ‘heinous and odious act by defiling the religious feelings of Muslims’.

It’s been over a year since the Central Asian state of Turkmenistan added further restrictions to its Religion Law, but the changes were introduced in such secrecy that few knew about them until well after the event.

It wasn’t until January 2017 that some light was shed on the changes, which will mostly affect smaller religious denominations such as Evangelical churches.

A child abducted in 2014 was reunited with her parents on 9 June.

Christina Abada, then aged three, was taken at gunpoint from her mother’s arms by IS fighters. She was released by Iraqi Special Forces. There had been rumours for the first two years that she was alive, but these had dried up over the past 12 months. Her mother and family praised Jesus for her release.

The family of a Malaysian pastor abducted more than 100 days ago have expressed their disappointment that police are investigating his alleged preaching to Muslims rather than focussing on finding him and bringing his kidnappers to justice.

Raymond Koh was abducted by masked men near his home in February.

In May, Jakarta’s Christian ex-governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (known as Ahok), withdrew his appeal against his two-year prison sentence for blasphemy in a controversial case that has challenged religious pluralism in Indonesia, with repeated clashes between Ahok’s supporters and radical Islamic groups.

It was for this reason, said Ahok, that he wished to drop his appeal ‘for the sake of our people and nation’.

A minister’s brother and nephew were killed in mid-May, possibly because the minister was head of the country’s Evangelical Alliance and was noted for his peacekeeping efforts.

An aid worker said: ‘Two or three ex-Séléka rebels – who have been in the town of Alindao for years and who knew Nicolas’ youngest brother very well – came to his home, and when his older son came out to meet them, one of them stabbed him twice. When Nicolas’ brother heard his son’s scream, he rushed out to see what was happening. That was when the other man shot him four times.’

President Erdoğan on 30 May increased speculation that Turkey has been holding jailed US pastor Andrew Brunson hostage since last October in order to extract political concessions from the United States.

Addressing the parliamentary assembly of his ruling Justice and Development Party, Erdoğan warned that, under international agreements, Turkey could retaliate against countries refusing to extradite Turkish nationals accused by Ankara of links to Fethullah Gülen, the Turkish Muslim cleric accused of plotting the failed July 2016 coup attempt to overthrow the Turkish Government.

A Sudan Church of Christ (SCOC) building was demolished on 17 May in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, ten days after the destruction of another SCOC building in nearby Soba, 12 miles south of the city.

The church had been there since 1983. However, another person recently claimed ownership, but refused to provide any proof. The authorities then demanded that the church vacate the land. Even when the church showed ownership documents, the authorities refused to hear the case.

A displaced Iraqi, Rabeea, has opened a sweet factory using resources from Christian organisations designed to help people get back on their feet, and is employing other displaced people.

He is producing traditional Iraqi sweets, sorjuq or halqoum. ‘We deliver our products to shops all over the country,’ he says. ‘But most of the sweets go to Suleymaniyah, Zakho and Shaklawa (towns across northeastern Iraq). We even have requests from abroad, but for now, with the current situation in our country, that is impossible.’

Police raided meetings of at least two Baptist churches on Easter Sunday, 16 April, including in the central city of Temirtau and the southern city of Taraz.

Tammar leads a church of young Uyghurs in Kazakhstan. On Easter Sunday, as 20 of them gathered, there was a sudden police raid, including members of the anti-terrorist team. All 20 had to sign a form saying they were at this ‘illegal’ meeting, and Tammar was fined $900. At first he wouldn’t sign, but his wife Nadina advised him to. He had to borrow money to pay the fine.

On 8 May, the Nigerian Government said it had secured the release of 82 of the nearly 300 girls kidnapped from their school in Chibok, northern Nigeria.

The government says it obtained the girls’ release in exchange for captured Boko Haram militants. ‘After lengthy negotiations, our security agencies have taken back these girls, in exchange for some Boko Haram suspects held by the authorities,’ said the statement, issued by Garba Shehu, senior special assistant to the President for media and publicity.

Ethiopia’s northern Tigray State is considering adopting a new law that would restrict Christian activities to within official church compounds, it was reported in early May.

This would render illegal the activities of smaller churches that do not own their own buildings and gather in houses. The law, if passed, would most affect Christians from outside the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, because any church that wanted to have its own land would need to prove that it had at least 6,000 members, a greater number than the total population of non-Orthodox Christians in the state. The law would also ban Christians from evangelising outside of church compounds.

The Special Envoy for the Promotion of Freedom of Religion or Belief outside the EU called in March for the pardon of two jailed Sudanese men, one a leader in the Sudan Church of Christ.

Both men were sentenced with the now-released Czech aid worker Petr Jasek. Since his pardon and release on 27 February 2017, supporters say there are no grounds to keep the other two in prison. Both prisoners had been arrested in December 2015 for ‘aiding and abetting’ Petr Jasek in his alleged ‘spying’.

An Indonesian Christian governor on trial for blasphemy said on 4 April that he has been the target of racist and religious attacks since his election to public office in 2005.

Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (known as ‘Ahok’), the governor of Jakarta, also reiterated to the court his belief that the Qur’anic verse at the centre of his trial does not tell Muslims they cannot vote for a Christian. (The verse instructs Muslims to ‘not take the Jews and the Christians as allies’.)

America’s top diplomat met on 30 March with the wife of US pastor Andrew Brunson, who was jailed in Turkey for nearly six months on undisclosed charges of involvement in a terrorist organisation.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was on a one-day stopover in the Turkish capital Ankara, meeting for the first time with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Local churches in Dunkirk helped to evacuate terrified migrants on 10 April as a devastating fire spread through their camp in northern France.

La Linière camp in Grande-Synthe, just outside Dunkirk, housed an estimated 1,500 migrants, including a handful of Christian converts, but was reduced to ‘a heap of ashes’, a local official said. Afghan migrants reportedly began to set fire to the chipboard cabins in which the migrants lived and the fires quickly spread. Riot police intervened.

The story of a Christian who risked her life to visit her family after escaping North Korea was highlighted in April.

It was a shock to Myoung-Hee (name changed for security reasons) when she discovered that most of her family were Christians. Although it was four decades ago, she remembers it well.

Convert from Islam, Ebrahim Firoozi, learned in late March that an Iranian appeals court in December 2016 upheld his five-year prison sentence for crimes related to practicing his faith.

In April 2015, a judge found him guilty of ‘actions against national security, being present at an illegal gathering and collusion with foreign entities’ – all standard charges levelled against converts to Christianity in Iran – and sentenced him to five years in jail.

Turkey’s Constitutional Court intervened promptly, in mid-February, to block temporarily the pending deportation and reentry ban ordered against a US citizen active in Christian ministry in Turkey for the past 17 years.

Without the High Court’s provisional ruling, Canadian-American David Byle would have been the fourth American Christian with long-term residency in Turkey to have been ordered out of the country in the past six months. All have been charged with posing a ‘threat to national security’, without explanation.

Hameedullah* works as a church leader in a country known for intense persecution of Christians.

When he was young, he lived illegally as a refugee in a Muslim country that didn’t want him or his religion. He even faced scrutiny from members of his own family, some of whom were recruited into terrorist networks.

A flare-up of violence in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic (CAR), on 7 February left a pastor dead and his church demolished.

According to the UN, at least three people were killed and 26 injured, including civilians and combatants.

It’s been over five months since a pioneering US missionary was kidnapped in Niger.

Jeff Woodke, who worked for Jeunesse en Mission Entraide et Developpement, a branch of the US-based Youth With a Mission, was abducted by unknown assailants in October, from the town of Abalak in northern Niger.

Dozens of Iraqi Christians in Lebanon protested in central Beirut in February, demanding that the UN should grant them quicker resettlement abroad.

Between 150 and 200 demonstrators gathered outside a UN building, carrying placards that read: ‘the future of our children is wasted’ and ‘our only demand is to [go] to countries that respect humans,’ among others.

The man charged with killing 39 people on New Year’s Eve at Istanbul’s exclusive Reina nightclub, Abdulkadir Masharipov, has tes-tified before a Turkish court saying: ‘my purpose was to kill Christians’.

The Uzbek national told the judge interrogating him that he was a member of so-called Islamic State, which had claimed responsibility for the attack the following day. IS had defined the massacre as revenge for Turkish military involvement in Syria. But Masaripov insisted that he did not consider his actions as an attack against the Turkish state.

A Coptic surgeon was found murdered in his flat on 13 January in Upper Egypt, making him the fourth Coptic Christian murder victim in ten days.

Married father-of-two Bassam Safwat Atta, 35, who lived in Dairut City in Asyut Governorate, had a single gash in his neck and was lying face down drenched in blood, according to a neighbour who found him.

Four Ethiopian teenagers given a one-month jail sentence for distributing Christian literature are reported to be in ‘good health’ following their release from prison in late 2016.

The girls were found guilty of ‘inciting religious violence’ and started their sentence on 25 November, despite three of them being minors. Gifti,14, Mihiret,14, Eden, 15, and Deborah, 18, served their time in a large prison in Gelemiso, alongside criminals. The girls were distributing a book in the eastern Ethiopian town of Babile, not far from Harar – a city recognised by UNESCO as the fourth holy city of Islam – when they were first arrested.

Germany’s Ministry for Immigration and Refugees is rejecting many applications for asylum from Iranian and Afghan converts from Islam to Christianity, following ‘kangaroo court’-style hearings it was reported in January.

The Revd Gottfried Martens, who has baptised more than 1,000 former Muslims, in a letter to supporters of his ministry, accused the ‘almost exclusively Muslim translators’ in the hearings of deliberately falsely translating the converts’ responses to jeopardise their applications.

Two Egyptian Coptic Christians found dead in their bed on 6 January – the traditional Christmas celebration for Copts – were murdered because of their faith, according to the brother of the dead woman.

Police said robbery was the motivation for the deaths of Gamal Sami, 60 and his wife, Nadia, 48, but her brother, Magdy Amin Girgis – the first person to reach the crime scene – said nothing was taken from the couple’s home. Magdy found his sister still wearing her jewellery after the double killing and nothing was missing.

A January report entitled ‘Women Rebuilding the Future of the Church’ found that women work as evangelists, Sunday School teachers and, increasingly, house-church leaders, and argues that, proportionally, more women in Iran are involved in ministry in Iran than in many Western countries, despite women not having equal standing in Iranian law.

Although Christianity is suppressed in Iran and conversion away from Islam is illegal, there are an estimated 800,000 covert believers, many of them converts from Islamic backgrounds. According to Open Doors, at least 193 Christians were arrested or imprisoned for their faith last year.

Anxiety is high among Christian communities in Nigeria’s northern state of Jigawa after authorities began demolishing church buildings in Dutse on 11 January.

Bulldozers, escorted by security forces, reduced to rubble the Redeemed Christian Church of God and the Lord Chosen Church. The Executive Secretary of Urban Development and some key police officers were at the scene. The police blocked all the entrances to prevent church members from entering the premises. Those who tried to take pictures were chased away by police officers. Then they went to the second church, which was also completely demolished.

Hwa-Young* works in China with women who flee North Korea or are abducted by people traffickers and taken across the border.

Many of the women are tempted to leave behind a miserable life when they are told there are jobs waiting for them in China. But often they are sold on to brothels or into marriages with poor Chinese Korean men.

Global charity Open Doors, in February, disputed the way in which statistics on Christian ‘martyrs’ are collected, arguing that an annual figure of 90,000 is significantly higher than the accurately verifiable number.

The figure, reported by some media and cited by an Italian academic on Vatican Radio, was published in research by the US-based Center for the Study of Global Christianity (CSGC) at Gordon-Conwell Seminary. Academics said they arrived at the figure by counting estimated killings of Christians between 2006 and 2015 and dividing the total by ten.

The 2017 Open Doors World Watch List was released and launched in the UK Parliament on 11 January .

One of the greatest increases in animosity towards Christians last year took place in India as a result of religiously motivated nationalism, according to the latest annual survey of the 50 countries in which it is most difficult to live as a Christian.

A video released by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) on 10 January, shows a new proof of life of the Swiss missionary Beatrice Stockly, held captive in Mali.

The short two-minute video shows a woman with her head covered by a black veil who identifies herself as Stockly.

It was reported on 4 January that Egyptian police have arrested four people in the wake of the bombing that killed dozens of Christians at Cairo’s Coptic Christian cathedral in December.

According to the Health Ministry, the death toll from the bombing at a chapel next to St Mark’s Cathedral in Cairo has risen to 28.

Almost 1,000 days since she was kidnapped with 275 other schoolgirls in Chibok, NE Nigeria, the 24th girl to be released from captivity was found on 5 January.

Rakiya Abubakar Gali was discovered by the army, who were questioning captured Boko Haram militants. She has a six-month-old baby. The kidnap on 14 April 2014 eventually generated worldwide headlines and fuelled a social-media storm, with the hashtag #bring-backourgirls and campaign group Bring Back our Girls (BBOG). It says 195 are still missing. 57 girls escaped shortly after being taken by extreme Islamist militants Boko Haram, while others have recently found freedom.

Christians in the south of Nigeria are failing to help their persecuted compatriots in the north, according to a veteran humanitarian campaigner, it was reported in late December.

Baroness Caroline Cox, who has made numerous aid missions to the country said: ‘My personal view is that many of those churches are immensely wealthy and I would hope they could do more to help those who are suffering in the north, particularly the internally displaced people who are left. They could work with churches [in the north] who know the needs to reach those most in need. From a Christian point of view, St Paul said that where one part of the Body of Christ suffers, we all suffer. There is an obligation to help our Christian brothers and sisters.’

A Nepali court in late December found four Christians guilty of violence and witchcraft against a severely mentally ill woman whom they sought to heal, even though she testified in court in their favour, saying she was now better.

The four were sentenced to five years in prison. A fifth Christian, Rupa Thapa, was found not guilty and released after the hearing in a district in western Nepal.

A man was released after being tortured by the so-called Islamic State (IS), and here shared his story of the horrible attack along with other stories of Christians experiencing unspeakable suffering.

IS jihadists hung Karlus, a 29-year-old cook, from the ceiling of the jail he was held in, by a rope attached to his left foot. As blood poured from his foot, they beat and kicked him, rubbing salt into his wounds. He was sexually abused in prison by three women wearing niqabs. He was told he would be shot dead, but for reasons he still does not understand, on the day his execution was due to take place, he was released.

Three teenage Christian girls appeared in court on 15 November in Babile, some 550km east of the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, charged by the authorities with inciting religious violence.

The girls, whose names were given as Eden, 15, Gifti, 14 and Mihiret, 14 – together with an older girl, named Deborah – were arrested in the mainly Muslim region, following the distribution of a Christian book apparently seeking to counter widely-circulated polemics against Christianity by a well-known Islamic critic.

A trauma care centre is being constructed in northern Nigeria to support Christians who have suffered religiously motivated violence or abuse at the hands of Boko Haram and Fulani herdsmen, it was announced in late November.

The centre is being built by Open Doors International, a charity which supports Christians under pressure for their faith. In April, the charity took a group of UK-based church leaders to visit the parents of the kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls and Christians in internally displaced people (IDP) camps – in Yola in the north-eastern state of Adamawa, and Jos in the central state of Plateau.

Tohar Haydarov, 33, was released on parole on 8 November after serving six years and ten months of his prison term, and returned to his home in Gulistan, eastern Uzbekistan.

Haydarov was found guilty in March 2010 of drugs charges, which local Baptists insist were fabricated. Release International said his arrest followed a request by some of his relatives that local police help them to force Haydarov to return to Islam.

The kidnap of a pioneering American missionary on 14 October is a ‘terrible tragedy’ for the communities he served for 24 years, according to the local mayor, and it has raised security concerns among the country’s missionary community.

Jeff Woodke, 55, who worked for a branch of the US-based Youth With a Mission, was abducted by unknown assailants from the town of Abalak in northern Niger. They killed two guards and he was taken to eastern Mali where Mujao – a radical Islamic group – have a stronghold.

Police re-arrested an 18-year-old Ethiopian Christian woman only hours after she was released on bail, it was reported in early November.

The woman, known as Deborah, was detained with three younger teenage girls for their part in handing out a book about Christianity in Babile, a town 550km from the capital, Addis Ababa.

The Chinese Government released a set of proposed amendments to its rules regulating religious affairs in early September, showing that President Xi Jinping is attempting to exert even greater control over how religion is practised.

The new set of amendments, up for a one-month consultation period, includes guidelines on religious education, the types of religious organisations that can exist, where they can exist and the activities they can organise.

On 10 September, three Iranian Christian converts were charged with ‘acting against national security’ and illegal consumption of alcohol during Communion.

Non-Muslims are permitted to drink alcohol in Iran, but leaving Islam is forbidden, so any such conversions are not recognised.

A trial of four men, including two Sudanese church leaders and a Czech aid worker, resumed on 29 August in Khartoum, with the prosecution accusing the defendants of highlighting alleged Christian suffering in war-ravaged areas of the country.

The four defendants are accused of conducting intelligence activities and providing support for rebels in Sudan’s South Kordofan region.

Eight Christians were, in late August, still awaiting the outcome of their trial after they were arrested for distributing pamphlets about Jesus during a trauma seminar in a Christian school.

They were the first to be arrested under the new constitution, but in the days that followed others were attacked. Six people were attacked by four of their neighbours, who beat them with steel rods. Other Christian families living nearby tried to stop them, but they were fought off.

A relatively unknown militant group inten-sified attacks in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in August, raising fears of the emergence of a new jihadist organisation in central Africa.

For years, one of various rebel groups operating there, the Islamist Allied Democratic Forces–National Association for the Liberation of Uganda (ADF–NALU), has been trying to uproot Christians from the north-east area of DRC through attacks, rape, looting, kidnap and murder – on an almost weekly basis.

Myanmar’s Christian population has seen the most dramatic shift in numbers, according to latest figures revealed in a supplement to the 2014 Population and Housing Census conducted by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA).

Christians now make up 6.2% of the population – more than three million people – compared to 4.9% recorded the last time a full census was conducted in 1983. The religious data is the latest in a staggered release of volumes published over the last two years.

Eight Christian counsellors in Nepal were on trial on 23 July, for the country’s first religious freedom case since the new Constitution was implemented on 2015.

One woman and seven men were arrested in June for distributing a pamphlet about Jesus in a Christian school while helping children through the trauma of last year’s earthquake. The group was eventually released on bail, before the trial in July.

The European Parliament Intergroup on Freedom of Religion or Belief and Religious Tolerance (FoRB & RT) on 30 June launched its third annual report on the state of freedom of religion or belief in the world for 2015.

‘This is a document to change the reality through the European Union institutions’, explained its co-president, Peter Van Dalen, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP). It gives recommendations for the European External Action Service (EEAS), the Council and the European Commission. Van Dalen, however, encouraged everyone to look beyond those pages because ‘people are suffering’.

Argentinian pastor Marcelo Nieva continues to face intimidation and threats, despite the 24/7 presence of the National Gendarmerie outside his church building, it was reported at the end of May.

The federal police office is currently assessing two court cases involving Nieva and his Pueblo Grande Baptist Church, although both have stalled in recent months. The first relates to an attempt on Nieva’s life in October 2014. The second is an appeal for justice relating to his claims that his church has suffered four years of religious persecution at the hands of the local authorities. After months without progress, the church is still awaiting a date for the next court hearing.

Churches in Algeria are facing intimidation and harassment, despite constitutional provisions guaranteeing freedom of worship in the country, it was reported in April.

On 24 April, a church in Mâatkas, in the north-eastern province of Kabylie, was ordered to cease all religious activities on the grounds that it was in breach of a 2006 law which regulates non-Muslim worship.

In a landmark ruling in late March, a Malaysian court upheld the rights of a Christian to convert from Islam.

The verdict reaffirms the supremacy of the Federal Constitution, which under Article 11 defends every Malaysian citizen’s right to freedom of religion.

Memorial events were held in Kenya on Saturday, 2 April, as Kenyans marked the anniversary of the day Al-Shabaab militants stormed the university campus in Garissa – in Kenya’s volatile east, near the Somalia border – and slaughtered 147 mostly Christian students.

This follows the welcome dropping of proposed religious laws by the government that would have brought state control of religion in the country. The so-called Religious Societies Rules 2015 were suggested in order to regulate churches and mosques in Kenya.

A group of UK MPs on 24 February urged the Government to adopt a harsher official assessment of Pakistan’s treatment of Christians.

The MPs say UN officials in Thailand, where thousands of Pakistani Christians have sought asylum, are not sufficiently concerned that Christians ‘face a real risk of persecution’ if returned to their home country. As a result the asylum process is prolonged. Meanwhile, Christians languish for years in jobless isolation, dependent on charity and trying to avoid arrest on charges of illegal immigration.

Christian migrants have been subjected to discrimination, harassment and violence from Muslim migrants with extremist views in various locations across Europe, it was reported in February.

The situation in the camp of Grande-Synthe in northern France, where Iranian converts have been targeted by migrants from Iraq, has raised great concerns among local churches, which are now supporting migrants by supplying them with food, clothing and, in some cases, even shelter.

The world’s deadliest terrorist group is not in the Middle East, but in Nigeria, where the Islamist insurgency Boko Haram and other forces killed more than 4,000 Christians in 2015, it was reported in February.

That tally was a 62% increase from the previous year, according to Open Doors.

Several days of attacks in the last week of February killed hundreds of people and sent thousands fleeing from largely Christian areas of Nigeria’s farming belt.

The armed attacks in and around Agatu, in the central Nigerian state of Benue, had features long familiar to Nigerians: ethnic Fulani cattle herders, largely Muslim, moving in on farmers, largely Christian.

Sri Lanka’s minority religious groups are concerned after Buddhist hardliners reacted angrily to President Maithripala Sirisena’s new constitution, proposed on 9 January.

The new constitution would decentralise power in a bid to prevent ethnic tensions, but Buddhist hardliners blasted the proposal, saying it contains provisions that regulate the power of the Buddhist clergy. The Justice and Buddha Sasana Minister, Wijeyasayadasa Rajapashe, denied this claim, saying they are intended only to enable the government to discipline monks who break the law.

A year has passed since the churches in Niger experienced, in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, the worst attacks in their history.

On the weekend of 16–17 January 2015, hundreds of angry Islamists ransacked more than 100 Christian properties and churches. Ten people lost their lives in the violence.

A Swiss missionary abducted for ten days in 2012 was kidnapped again on 8 January in Mali’s northern city of Timbuktu.

Beatrice Stockly was taken from her residence before dawn by armed men who arrived in four pickup trucks.

President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo on 23 December promised a safe Christmas celebration throughout Indonesia.

Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim nation, but only one of its provinces, Aceh, in the Singkil regency, applies shari’a law.

Eight young people were shot and three killed when an unidentified gunman opened fire outside a Christian radio station in Mali on 17 December.

The motive for the attack on the Tahanint radio station in Timbuktu is unknown, but witnesses described the gunman as a turbaned Tuareg. Tahanint, which means ‘mercy’ in the local dialect, had just finished broadcasting for the day when the eight were shot outside the building. The radio station is closely linked with a local Baptist church and evangelical mission.

A report by IRIN (originally the Integrated Regional Information Networks), published on 2 November and based on visits to Nigeria’s NE region which the military has retaken from the Boko Haram insurgency, reveals an unprecedented humanitarian disaster in the Lake Chad Basin region.

Syrian refugees who have the means head for their country of choice, armies of aid workers and volunteers helping them along the way. But in West Africa, Nigerians displaced by Boko Haram have relatively little help and find refuge where they can, IRIN says in its report. ‘Fleeing Boko Haram: nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.’

Militants of Islamic State (IS) came within 3 kilometres of the Syriac Orthodox town of Sadad in western Syria, it was reported on 12 November.

The largely Christian towns of Sadad and Haffar were under intense bombing and shelling from 1 November, forcing around 2,385 families from their homes.

The self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) has released another 37 Assyrian Christians kidnapped nine months ago in Syria, Assyrian sources said.

The group, including men and women in their 60s and 70s, were among the 253 Christians snatched in IS attacks on Assyrian villages in north-eastern Syria’s Hassaka province.

The lawyer of the only Pakistani Christian woman to be given the death penalty for alleged blasphemy met her in prison in late October, reporting that she is safe and in good health.

The final appeal for Aasiya Noreen, commonly known as Asia Bibi, is pending before Pakistan’s top court, after Lahore High Court turned down her appeal on technical grounds. Through Malook, a prominent attorney and expert in Islamic law, Noreen had been allowed to take the final appeal against her death penalty to the Supreme Court in Islamabad in July 2015. The mother of five has been in prison since the summer of 2009.

A programme organised by Bargad, Pakistan’s biggest NGO for youth development, is attempting to tackle the social stigma Christians face from the word used in the Constitution for them, it was reported in early November.

Isai The Urdu (derived from Isa, the Arabic word for Jesus) now carries strong overtones of uncleanness associated with demeaning occupations. This language feeds the narrative which makes Christians feel like second-class citizens in today’s society.

It has been almost 12 months since Argentinian pastor Marcelo Nieva survived an assassination attempt, but he has in October this year been forced to leave his church.

In May 2014, he said that the introduction of a state law in August 2013 purporting to safeguard religious freedom was having the opposite effect. He said that the lives of his wife Janet (now 24) and baby daughter Marta (then just one month old) had been threatened, while pressure on his church, the majority of whose members were former drug addicts and prostitutes, had increased.

A sixth Indian state is debating the introduction of an ‘Anti-Conversion Law’.

Maharashtra would follow Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh in implementing a Freedom of Religion Act, which seems harmless in name, but in practice discourages evangelism. Pramod Singh, President, Christian Legal Association of India, said: ‘It is going to affect Christians in particular because propagation is something which is very intrinsic in the [Christian] faith.’

The radical Islamist group Boko Haram has stepped up its suicide bombing attacks in northern Nigeria and Cameroon.

On 31 July, a massive bomb exploded in the market in Maiduguri, N.E. Nigeria – the traditional heartland of Boko Haram violence. At least six died and 11 were injured.

Nepali Christians fear that proposed amendments to Nepal’s new constitution, which came into effect on 10 August after seven years of parliamentary discussions, could eventually render all Christian activity illegal.

Attempting to convert someone to another religion is already prohibited in Nepal, but the proposed amendments would mean that anything perceived as ‘evangelistic’ could be punishable by fines or prison.

The first ever European Games began on 13 June in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan.

Even as the Games started, the Organisation of Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) which has a responsibility to oversee fair elections, due this Autumn, was given one month to halt its operations in the country. Azerbaijan’s famously repressive regime makes life difficult for all its citizens, including Christians.

Tabita Adamu (44), her 18-year-old daughter Haske and 11-year-old son Nuhu died in a July 5 bomb blast during church services in north-east Nigeria.

Tabita’s brother Habila has become quite well known after he travelled abroad telling how he‘d been ‘left for dead’ in 2012.

Bahaa Gamal Mikhail Silvanus (23), a conscript in the Egyptian Army and the only Christian in his unit stationed in Suez, was found dead on 24 June in a chair in the office of the military base where he was stationed, with two bullet wounds in his chest and a gun at his feet.

The army says Silvanus killed himself. His family, friends and church pastors don’t believe it, because, first of all, Bahaa Silvanus was a happy man with a strong faith, a university degree in music and plans to enter the monastic life. Secondly, someone who kills himself with a gun never shoots more than once.

In June, almost two months since 12 evangelical Christian families – 49 people in all – were allowed to return to the village of Buenavista Bawitz in the southern state of Chiapas, the families say that all is ‘completely calm’.

The families returned to the village after five years of exile imposed by village elders and authorities for leaving the ‘traditionalist’ church (which blends aspects of indigenous paganism and popular Catholicism). During those years several children were born, while older ones had been at school in the nearest major city, Comitán. Some will continue to go to school there, 30km from home, for the remainder of the school year, before their parents decide whether to re-enrol them at the village school, which, unlike the city school, conducts lessons in the local language, Tojolabal, and not Spanish.

63 churches have been damaged or destroyed so far during four years of civil war in Syria, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) said in May.

In a comprehensive 21-page report, first published in Arabic on 7 May and then in English, the rights group, known for being anti-government, launched a withering attack on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces, claiming they were responsible for almost two thirds of the attacks.

Danger levels rose sharply in late April for northeast Syria’s isolated Assyrian Christians, caught for nearly three months between Kurdish militias and Syrian army forces battling with militants of the self-proclaimed Islamic State for control of Hassaka province.

‘We are going through a terrible moment’, Syriac Catholic Archbishop Jacques Behnan Hindo told Fides News on 30 April. ‘The jihadists of the Islamic State attacked Hassaka for two days. They were warded off by the [Syrian] army and Kurdish militias. But we are cut off, like an island surrounded by jihadists from all sides.’

Turkish Christians took the first step toward embittered Armenians declaring: ‘We came to share your pain’, as they stood before TV cameras on 11 April at the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan.

‘We have come here to apologise for what our ancestors did, to ask for your forgiveness,’ two spokesmen for the Turks went on to say. Shocked viewers across Armenia watching the Azdarar TV news channel could hardly believe their eyes and ears. Turks, claiming to be Christian? And laying wreaths at the nation’s genocide memorial? How could Turks, of all people, come to Armenia to honour the memory of more than a million Armenian Christians who had been slaughtered 100 years ago by their own forefathers, the Ottoman Turks?

The Christian Association of Nigeria and the National Christian Elders Forum each issued congratulatory statements to Muhammadu Buhari, who won the presidential election on 28 March. They also praised Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian, for relinquishing power peacefully.

Buhari swept the majority-Muslim northern states, while Jonathan captured the Christian-majority southeast. The election was won for Buhari in the Christian southwest, home to his vice-presidential running mate, Yemi Osinbajo, pastor of the Redeemed Church of God, a large Pentecostal church in southern Nigeria. A coalition of southwestern clergy, under the banner ‘Christians for Governance, Pastors for Change’, endorsed Buhari.

Turkish Christian Ender Peker is used to facing hostility from religious Muslims, particularly because he lives in Turkey’s conservative southeast. So he was shocked in the autumn of 2014 when an imam asked him to take over food distribution at a nearby refugee camp.

The refugees were Iraqi Yezidis. As a monotheistic religion that includes elements of ancient Iranian religions, Christianity and Islam, Yezidis are so unorthodox that most Muslims have traditionally derided them as ‘devil worshippers’. This meant that when, along with other Iraqis fleeing Islamic State attacks, traumatised Yezidis escaped to Turkey in their thousands last summer, they were afraid to live among Iraqi Muslims in refugee camps set up by the Turkish national government.

On 14 April 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped 275 girls from the government secondary school in the Christian-dominated town of Chibok, Borno State.

43 girls escaped, some during the attack at the school and others during the journey to a camp in the Sambisa forest, where the captive girls were initially kept.

A criminal court in January released two former military officers and an Islamic university researcher who had been jailed for nearly four years on suspected involvement in the 2007 murders of three Christians in southeast Turkey.

At the 101st hearing of the case on 21 January, the Malatya First High Criminal Court ruled that the three men – Ret. Col. Mehmet Ulger, Maj. Haydar Yesil and Ruhi Abat – be set free pending the conclusion of the trial.

Hundreds of extremist Islamists attacked a Christian school in Bangladesh on 5 November in response to locals who were outraged by rumours stating that the school, which welcomes children of all faiths, was forcing Muslim children to convert to Christianity.

The mob comprised about 200 people. The students were not physically injured, but 12 of its 14 members of staff were beaten. A female teacher endured a serious head injury. Another teacher said that he managed to run away from six Madrasa students, armed with knives and machetes, after being forced out of his classroom.

In an aggressive move to position itself as the intellectual centre of the Muslim world, Turkey announced in late October plans to open an Islamic university similar to Egypt’s Al-Azhar, the oldest and most respected centre of Islamic learning.

Ankara’s announcement comes amid years of legal stonewalling for Turkey’s Christian minorities to build their own seminaries. The Turkish Ministry of Religious Affairs put forth plans in October to transform the private Istanbul 29 Mayis University into an Islamic school. According to state officials, it will become an ‘example’ to Al-Azhar.

The Pakistan court that in October said Aasiya Noreen (Asia Bibi), a Christian, must die for the crime of insulting Islam, based its ruling on a legal technicality that it now wants to eliminate.

The Lahore High Court, an appeals court for Pakistan’s largest province, decided that it would let stand the 2010 conviction of Aasiya, a day-labour berry picker whose argument with a Muslim co-worker blew up into a highly-charged test of the country’s anti-blasphemy laws. The appeals judges now explain they had no choice, given the way Pakistan’s laws are written, and have turned to lawmakers to craft legislation that would empower trial courts to apply a test that would make future blasphemy convictions much more difficult to achieve. That test was not in place when Aasiya was tried.

Suspects accused of helping to orchestrate the brutal murders of three Christians, in southeast Turkey in 2007, blamed the crime on the Hizmet movement, an influential Islamic group accused of treason by the ruling Turkish government, at the 97th round of hearings on 15 October.

Testimony from two former military officers and an Islamic university researcher dominated the hearings in a trial that has gone on for seven years The accused perpetrators were brought from prison to read out their lengthy defence claims to the Malatya First High Criminal Court.

The last of a group of 20 Syrian Christians kidnapped on 5 October have been released as their pastor awaits trial before an Islamic court.

Hanna Jallouf was abducted with about 20 other Christians eight kilometres from the Turkish border, an area where al-Nusra Front and other rebel groups have been fighting the Syrian army for three years.

Many people are asking about Islamic State, its threat to non-Muslims and its aim for global domination and worldwide caliphate.

Here are some answers.

Boko Haram withdrew from Madagali on August 25, after holding the town for 24 hours.

Nonetheless, the offensive caused widespread displacement of the mostly Christian residents and others from surrounding villages who were taking refuge in Madagali. Most have made their way to Mubi, about 80 kilometres away, itself the victim of a serious Boko Haram attack in October 2012.

September brought the news that Northern Cameroon is more than ever in the sights of Boko Haram, as details of atrocities committed by the radical Islamic sect from neighbouring Nigeria continue to emerge.

The militant sect, which now controls several major Nigerian towns, has set up a caliphate with a strict implementation of shari’a law.

In what looks like a bid to extend its influence in the South Asian region, so-called Islamic State (IS) militants have allegedly distributed 12-page pamphlets in the north-west of Pakistan, in Peshawar and in Afghan refugee camps based near its outskirts, it was reported in early September.

They were written in Pashto and Dari, and titled Fatah (Victory) The editor’s name, however, appears fake and their place of publication obscure. For a long time, Afghan resistance groups, including the Haqqani Network, Hizb-e-Islami Afghanistan and the Tora Bora group have published similar pamphlets, magazines and propaganda literature in Peshawar’s black markets. However this latest spread has raised fears of a possible link between IS and such militants, threatening all non-Muslims.

Several villages in central India have outlawed the open practice of Christianity – a move of questionable legality that worries church leaders who say it has already encouraged anti-Christian violence.

The village of Belar, in Chhattisgarh’s southeast district of Bastar, convened a village assembly on July 6 and passed a resolution banning all non-Hindu religious activities.

Armed groups in the Central African Republic in July reached a ceasefire deal aimed at putting an end to the violence that has engulfed the country since March 2013.

The ten-part agreement was signed on July 23 in Brazzaville, the capital of the neighbouring Republic of Congo, under the aegis of Congolese President Denis Sassou Nguesso, the international mediator on the crisis in CAR.

After at least 65 people were killed on June 15 in the predominantly Christian town of Mkepetoni, 40 km inland from Kenya’s mainly Muslim coastal strip, attacks in the area have continued and residents are sleeping in a nearby prison because they are scared to stay at home.

On July 5, in a Hindi village 20 km from Mkepetoni, up to 20 attackers killed at least 13 people with guns and knives. Among those killed was Kenya Kazungu, who was found with a Bible on his back in a pool of blood. On July 7, assailants arrived at Covenant Church as a Bible study ended. As participants fled, two men, who instead chose to hide, died when the attackers set fire to the building.

A Pakistani Muslim NGO said in June that every year between 100 to 700 Christian women, ‘usually between the ages of 12 and 25 are abducted, converted to Islam, and married to the abductor or third party’.

In its investigative report ‘Forced Marriages and Forced Conversions in the Christian Community of Pakistan’ the Movement for Solidarity and Peace (MSP) identified a pattern. In most of the abduction cases the parents of Christian victims file a police report, but in response the abductor’s relatives or friends file another police complaint on behalf of the abducted Christian woman, claiming that she wilfully married and converted to Islam, and that her parents are now ‘harassing’ her unlawfully.

Boko Haram militants have killed at least 200 more people in a wave of attacks launched across Borno state in Northern Nigeria during the second week of June.

Three Christian villages – Attagara, Agapalwa and Aganjara – were reduced to ashes. Attackers killed, looted and stole cattle before burning homes and churches, say local media. All the villages are located a few kilometres from the Cameroon border, near the vast Sambisa forest, which hosts several militants’ camps, and where some of the missing Chibok girls were believed to be.

An Armenian Syrian pastor, whose family is from Kessab, close to Syria’s northern border with Turkey, has reported that they fled the village after Syrian rebel jihadists took control of the area on March 21.

The Armenian pastor wrote that the day after the al-Qaeda-linked fighters took control, most of the town’s population (some 650 families, over 3000 individuals) fled into the hills or had taken refuge in the coastal city of Latakia, about 50km south of Kessab. Nothing has been heard since from those who remained to guard family properties.

A public university in Pakistan has defied court orders and misled government authorities to avoid giving federally approved jobs to non-Muslims, a Christian politician in the nation’s ruling party said in March.

In May 2009 the Federal Government passed a law requiring 5% of jobs to be allocated to religious minorities. The University of Sargodha has hired hundreds of employees since this legislation was implemented in 2010, but continues to use bureaucratic tactics to avoid hiring non-Muslims, according to Chaudhry Mustaq Gill, a Christian political leader in the Pakistan Muslim League.

More than 150 people have been killed in a few days around March 14 in central and northern Nigeria in separate attacks on villages populated by a concentration of Christians.

Gunmen raided three villages in Kaduna state in central Nigeria, killing at least 114 people. The attackers opened fire on the villages of Ugwar Sankwai, Ungwan Gata and Chenshyi at about 11pm.

Five Turkish murder suspects on trial for torturing and killing three Christians in Malatya in 2007 were released on March 7, before the conclusion of their trial in southeast Turkey.

Under a new judicial package passed by the Turkish Parliament in late February, the detention limit for suspects on trial who have not yet been convicted was reduced from ten to five years. Once the proposed laws were approved by the Turkish President and published in the Official Gazette in early March the five Malatya suspects became eligible for immediate release.

An Egyptian pharmacist was arrested in connection with the stabbing to death of a Christian woman on February 8.

Madeleine Wagih, 35, was working alone in Mahaba Pharmacy in Kom Ombo, a Nile River city of about 60,000 people in southern Egypt. A man charged into the shop, brandishing a pocketknife. He stabbed Wagih in the throat, severing an artery. She bled to death quickly, said the Rev. Rofael Rizk, a Coptic Orthodox priest in Kom Ombo.

North Korea has ordered the death of as many as 33 people because of their alleged contact with a missionary, South Korea’s largest news organisation has reported.

The 33 North Koreans are charged with attempting to overthrow the regime by setting up 500 underground churches. The newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, said they are accused of working with Kim Jung-wook, a South Korean arrested by North Korean authorities in October on suspicion of trying to establish underground churches.

At least 43 people died in two separate attacks in February.

During the first attack in the early hours of February 20, 14 people were killed when gunmen attacked Rapyem village. All the victims were Christians, and were fast asleep when the village was stormed.

An assistant pastor at a church in Mombasa, Kenya, was killed on February 2, while guarding his church during the night.

Lawrence Kazungu Kadenge, 59, assistant pastor at the Glory of God Ministries Church, died at about 2 am. Witnesses reported seeing two men fleeing the area.

The man chosen to lead what he says is 51% of the population of the Central African Republic (CAR), its protestants, says that the conflict in the country has nothing to do with religion, it was reported in late January.

Nicolas Guerékoyamé-Gbangou, a guest lecturer at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), said that fighting between members of the disbanded Séléka rebel group and the anti-balaka (anti-machete) self-defence militias is not a battle between Muslims and Christians.

An attack on lawyers hired to defend 17 detained Christians in central China, shown around the world on Sky TV on December 13, drew attention to a case which may not be as clear-cut as it has been reported.

The church leader at the centre of the dispute, Pastor Zhang Shaojie, appears to have been pushing the boundaries of what might be deemed ‘appropriate’ for a church leader within the government-sanctioned Three Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM), not least in hiring lawyers known to be close to the China Aid Association.

A report presented to the European Parliament on December 4 showed that around 30,000 Eritreans have been kidnapped since 2007 and taken to Sinai while ransom payments are demanded.

The report, conducted by an Eritrean human-rights activist and professors from a Dutch university, said that a total of around $600million (€468million) was extorted from families. Christians are among the thousands kidnapped.

About 40 people were killed in coordinated attacks in early December in four Christian-dominated villages in a central Nigerian state.

Local sources contacted report that the assailants, believed to be members of the Fulani tribe, came at around 2am, attacking the Berom communities in the villages of Katu Kapang, Daron, Tul and Rawuru. Those killed included a one-year-old boy shot at close range, a four-year old and several women and other children, villagers told local media. The chairman of the state chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Rev. Soja Bewarang, condemned in strong terms the ‘barbarous act’ in which pregnant women and children were killed.

A vigilante committee has been formed in central Bangladesh to stop Christian activities in the local community, three months after the construction of a local church was halted, it was reported in late November.

The committee is made up of political leaders, Muslim elders and an elected local government official.

Consensus is emerging to begin ‘contingency planning’ to send a UN peacekeeping force to the lawless Central African Republic (CAR), the UN’s No.2 official said in mid-November.

‘The country in the heart of Africa is descending into complete chaos before our eyes and requires a capable security force on the ground’, UN Deputy Secretary General Jan Eliasson told the UN Security Council. The occupation: ‘must be robust and prevent what has the high potential to result in widespread atrocities’.

The Chinese government has welcomed the role of the church in providing social care in the country.

China’s leaders held meetings in mid-November in Beijing to discuss the economic and political agenda for the next decade, in which it seems the church will play a vital role. Though it is the world’s second biggest economy, China is facing a social care crisis, particularly in caring for an increasingly elderly population.

The government of Cameroon in August ordered the closure of dozens of churches in an attempt to put an end to what it considers to be anarchy among some Christian organisations.

The measure, which authorities began to impose on August 23, targets Pentecostal churches, which are not officially recognised.

Pakistan’s Christians appear to have thrown some of their political support to Nawaz Sharif in the May 11 national election, even as they have reason to be wary of his return to power on June 5.

Sharif’s party, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, or PMLN, won 124 of the 272 directly elected seats in the lower house of Parliament. In Punjab province, home to more than half of Pakistan’s population and 80% of its Christians, the PMLN won a two-thirds majority in the provincial government.

An interfaith group of Indonesian clerics on May 6 led a small march to the US embassy in Jakarta to deliver a letter protesting the decision by the Appeal of Conscience Foundation to give its 2013 World Statesman Award to Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono on May 30.

The New York-based foundation, created in 1965, issues its annual award to a ‘leader who has helped advance freedom, democracy, human rights and peace globally’.

An interfaith group of Indonesian clerics on May 6 led a small march to the US embassy in Jakarta to deliver a letter protesting the decision by the Appeal of Conscience Foundation to give its 2013 World Statesman Award to Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono on May 30.

The New York-based foundation, created in 1965, issues its annual award to a ‘leader who has helped advance freedom, democracy, human rights and peace globally’.

Pakistan’s Christians appear to have thrown some of their political support to Nawaz Sharif in the May 11 national election, even as they have reason to be wary of his return to power on June 5.

Sharif’s party, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, or PMLN, won 124 of the 272 directly elected seats in the lower house of Parliament. In Punjab province, home to more than half of Pakistan’s population and 80% of its Christians, the PMLN won a two-thirds majority in the provincial government.