On November 1, 2005, the UN General Assembly resolution designated January 27th as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Holocaust refers to the genocide of approximately six million European Jews that were systematically murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945, roughly two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. With antisemitism on the rise around the world, it is more important …

Amidst an alarming trend of rising intolerance, hostility, and incidents targeting Christians, ranging from threats and disruptions to arrests and outright attacks, more than 400 influential Christian leaders and 30 church groups sent an urgent appeal the last week of December to President Draupadi Murmu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The letter calls for immediate and decisive action to curb …

President Jimmy Carter believed that religious actors play a crucial role in promoting peace and advancing human dignity. His lifelong commitment to fostering dialogue, protecting human rights, and addressing the root causes of conflict inspired and united people around the world. The Baptist World Alliance recently issued a press release about President Carter, a Baptist lay leader and President of …

By Rev. Dr. Thong Kho Lun Dec. 2, 2024 I grew up in Tamu town, an Indo-Burma border town in Sagaing Region or province located in the Northwest part of Burma (Myanmar.) My parents practiced spirit worship but they converted to Christianity when I was a young child. Because we lived in a predominately Buddhist area, I attended a Buddhist …

November 8, 2024 As part of Christianity Today’s “One Kingdom Campaign,” the publication is publishing stories illuminating the global church. Today, CT’s editors posted online the contributions from 22 evangelical leaders around the world about their reactions to US election results. The responses are segmented by region: Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America, the Middle East, and Oceania. Below, …

October 25, 2024 The International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church (often abbreviated as IDOP) is an observance within the Christian calendar in which congregations around the world set aside two days to unite in prayer for Christians who are persecuted for their faith. They fall on the first and second Sunday of November (November 3 and 10, 2024). …

September 4, 2024 Written by Rachel As a mission-oriented woman, passionate about winning souls for Christ and seeing to the well-being of mankind, I have been actively involved with Baptist women in local communities across Nigeria for many years. I work towards empowering, educating, and engaging them in various capacities. My work focuses on planning, strategizing, counseling, implementing, coordinating, and …

July 22, 2024 The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) is an independent, bipartisan federal government entity established by the U.S. Congress with the passage of the IRF Act of 1998 to monitor, analyze, and report on threats to religious freedom abroad. USCIRF makes foreign policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State and Congress intended to deter …

June 26, 2024 Freedom of religion or belief is both a core American value and a universal human right.  Mandated by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, the annual International Religious Freedom Report details the status of religious freedom in 199 foreign countries and territories and describes U.S. actions to advance religious freedom worldwide.  The State Department’s annual report …

August 28. 2024 The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) released its 2024 Annual Report that documents developments during 2023, and provides recommendations to enhance the U.S. government’s promotion of freedom of religion or belief abroad. This is the 25th report issued since the Commission was established by the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) in 1998.   Each year …

April 16, 2024 Unanswered questions continue to surround the violent death of a Baptist minister in northern Myanmar’s Kachin state. Masked gunmen shot and killed Nammye Hkun Jaw Li, who was at one time a leader in the Kachin Baptist Convention and was active in the Pat Jasan community-based anti-drug campaign. Since the military regime seized control three years ago, …

March 29, 2024 Christianity’s long history in Algeria is threatened. Algeria uses a discriminatory law to crack down on religious minorities. As the government closes churches and slows down the registration process for religious groups, Algerian Christians are finding life increasingly difficult.  The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) confirms that Algeria is escalating repression of religious minorities. …

February 12, 2024 Given their decades long commitment to defending and advancing religious freedom around the world, it is not surprising that the faith community in Midland, Texas has once again stepped forward to support Christians previously persecuted for their faith. Citizens of Midland were active in advocating for the Sudan Peace Act which passed in the US Congress in …

January 21, 2024 In recognition of 25 years since the International Religious Freedom Act was signed by President Clinton on October 27, 1998, the Secretary of State held a special event to acknowledge the Department’s 2024 International Religious Freedom Award recipients. The following individuals were recognized for their courage and commitment to promoting and defending religious freedom globally: Farid Ahmed, …

January 20, 2024 Reprinted from Religionnews.com In its annual list detailing countries of concern when it comes to persecution against Christians, the organization Open Doors International highlighted outbreaks of violence against sub-Saharan African Christians, where 16.2 million were forced out of their homes at the end of 2022. The World Watch report, published at the beginning of every year, tracks …

January 5, 2024 Reprinted from Pillarcatholic.com The regime of Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega freed the imprisoned Bishop Rolando José Álvarez of Matagalpa on Sunday, and expelled the prelate from the country. Álvarez arrived in Vatican City Jan. 14, directly after his release. The bishop had been sentenced to 26 years in prison, and has been a political prisoner in Nicaragua …

January 4, 2024 Washington, DC – The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) calls for a congressional hearing after reiterating its extreme disappointment that the U.S. Department of State yet again failed to designate Nigeria and India as Countries of Particular Concern (CPC), despite both countries repeatedly meeting the legal standard. Despite this disappointment, USCIRF welcomed the State Department’s decision …

January 2, 2024 In Plateau State Nigeria, Fulani militias attacked Christian villages on Christmas Eve, killing nearly 200 villagers. The International Committee on Nigeria (ICON) reports that Christmas 2023 was one of the bloodiest in Plateau State. These killings, being meted out by well-armed Fulani Islamic militants (aka: bandits), against rural Christian farmers remain a constant occurrence. There are 36 states …

Rhoda Jatau now safe in undisclosed location while she awaits trial, still facing up to 5 years imprisonment.  Jatau, a Christian and mother of 5, was imprisoned for allegedly sharing a blasphemous video that condemned the lynching of Christian college student Deborah Emmanuel Yakubu.   December 14, 2023 A judge in Bauchi State, Nigeria, has granted bail to Rhoda Jatau. Jatau, …

October 25, 2023 In the heart of the dry and dusty West Texas oil fields rests the city of Midland. For most outsiders, Midland is best known as the childhood home of former President George W. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush. At the turn of the millennium, however, the quiet, industrious town halfway between Fort Worth and El …

September 26, 2023 IDOP 2023 is on November 5, 2023 and the theme is: “Courage to Rise Above” Joshua 1:9 with a focus on India, Nigeria and Nicaragua. IDOP stands for International Day of Prayer: for the Persecuted Church. Every year, Christians around the world set a day aside for prayer for our sisters and brothers who are persecuted for …

June 26, 2023 Ken Camp/Managing Editor  Reprinted with permission from Baptiststandard.com Persecution of religious minorities with Russia has escalated since the invasion of Ukraine, where Russia’s military has destroyed houses of worship and tortured religious leaders, according to two reports from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. The commission released both “Religious Freedom Conditions in the Russian Federation” and “Russia’s …

Ken Camp / Managing Editor    June 19, 2023 This article is reprinted from Baptiststandard.com Pastor Pan Yongguang prayed for his flock throughout their more than three-year ordeal, when he and members of his persecuted church feared deportation back to China. Today, he echoes the Apostle Paul’s testimony to the Ephesian church that God is able to do “abundantly more …

May 31, 2023 By Marcela Szymanski This article is reprinted with permission from Forbwomen.org. Amidst a deteriorating economy, political uncertainty and regional challenges in Lebanon, I learned more about the status of women during a recent trip there: while the Lebanese government officially recognizes 18 religious groups, each of these groups has its own laws on “family matters.”[1]  Lebanese citizens …

May 31, 2023 In the State of Manipur India, ethnic tensions between the majority Meitei people and the minority ethnic Kuki/Zomi/Mizo people in Manipur spilled out into violence and targeting of minority religious communities. It is reported by local partners that Meitei mobs killed 50 people, injured hundreds, burnt or vandalized 130 churches, and have caused 1000s to be displaced …

May 31, 2023 I joined @IRF_Ambassador Hussain to launch the International Religious Freedom Report: a key part of our efforts to advance freedom of religion or belief, a core American value and a fundamental freedom enshrined in international law,” Secretary Blinken on Twitter.  Access 2022 report here. Background The Department of State submits an annual Report to Congress on International Religious …

March 20, 2023 By Merritt Johnston/Reprinted with permission from FoRBwomen.org Watching or reading the news today is a sobering experience. Yet, even amid a steady stream of tragic events, there are still moments that stop you in your tracks – news that grips your heart, consumes your mind, unsteadies your step. Just days before Christmas, I received word that a …

February 12, 2023 This article written by Ken Camp is reprinted from Baptiststandard.com Documented violations of religious freedom in Cuba more than doubled from 2021 to 2022, a new report revealed. Christian Solidarity Worldwide—a human rights organization based in the United Kingdom—reported 657 documented violations of freedom of religion or belief in 2022, compared to 272 the previous year. Actual …

The following story is excerpted from an article published online January 26, 2023 by The European Times. Link to the article here. Ms. Dabrina Bet-Tamraz, a Protestant from the Assyrian ethnic minority in Iran, who is now living in Switzerland, had been invited to testify about the persecution of Christians in Iran, through the example of her own family. “When I …

January 27, 2023 Open Doors’ mission is to ensure that persecuted Christians do not suffer alone – but are connected to the worldwide church for support and encouragement. Since 1993, the World Watch List has revealed the scale and severity of the persecution of Christians. In the last 30 years, the number of countries where Christians suffer high and extreme levels …

October 30, 2022 Two years ago 21Wilberforce entered into a strategic partnership with the Baptist World Alliance and one of the key goals was to develop a mobilization and support program to equip faith communities to engage in protecting religious freedom and defending the persecuted. Central to this program are regional representative 21Wilberforce Ambassadors that work with churches, organizations and …

October 11, 2022 By Dr. Christine M. Sequenzia and Soraya Marikar Deen In nations lacking certain religious freedoms, the bold multi-faith membership of the International Religious Freedom Roundtable’s Campaign to Eliminate Apostasy and Blasphemy Laws, would be forbidden. This archaic, and at times, violent fact is driving a biblical justice authority, an international activist and a team of culturally and …

August 23, 2022 William Wilberforce, (born August 24, 1759, Hull, Yorkshire, England—died July 29, 1833, London), British politician and philanthropist who from 1787 was prominent in the struggle to abolish the slave trade and then to abolish slavery itself in British overseas possessions. He studied at St. John’s College at the University of Cambridge, where he became a close friend of the future prime minister William Pitt the Younger and was …

July 26, 2022 Religious restrictions and hostilities around the world have risen steadily over the past few decades, reaching an all-time high in 2018 — a trend that has only worsened with the COVID-19 pandemic. Against this backdrop, the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) collaborated with USAID’s Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to critically examine the causes and …

June 03, 2022 By Farahnaz Ispahani & Sean Nelson On May 12, a Nigerian Christian student named Deborah Emmanuel Yakubu was stoned, beaten to death, and her body burnt in Sokoto, Nigeria, by her fellow classmates because of allegations of blasphemy. On May 16, protestors in Borno State, Nigeria, went to police headquarters in Maiduguri demanding the release of Christian woman Naomi Goni so that …

June 31, 2022 Western governments are demanding that U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet receive full access to sites and individuals in China’s western Xinjiang region following this week’s release of highly detailed reports of rights violations in the region. “This new reporting further adds to an already damning body of evidence of [China’s] atrocities in Xinjiang,” said …

April 12, 2022 Ken Camp, Baptiststandard.com A Cuban Protestant pastor who has been detained since participating in peaceful protests last July has been sentenced to eight years in prison. Pastor Lorenzo Rosales Fajardo’s sentence was acknowledged in a document the Permanent Mission of Cuba in Geneva sent to the United Nations. It was submitted in response to a request from the …

April 13, 2022 Baptiststandard.com Advocates for international religious freedom praised the U.S. House of Representatives for passing legislation to hold accountable the Myanmar military for human rights violations and to authorize humanitarian assistance to the Burmese people. The House passed the Burma Unified through Rigorous Military Accountability Act of 2021 with broad bipartisan support on April 6. The BURMA Act requires the …

March 20, 2022 Biden administration has formally determined that violence committed against the Rohingya minority by Myanmar’s military amounts to genocide and crimes against humanity, U.S. officials told Reuters, a move that advocates say should bolster efforts to hold the junta that now runs Myanmar accountable. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the decision on Monday at the U.S. Holocaust …

November 15, 2021 By Abigail Mittendorf and Katelyn Aluise The Loeb Institute for Religious Freedom in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences recently launched a project mapping disparities in religious freedom worldwide in collaboration with two non-governmental organizations. Officials at the Loeb Institute teamed up with 21Wilberforce and Genocide Watch to create and publish the Religious Freedom Data Spectrum that uses qualitative data to locate places of religious oppression and …

October 28, 2021

September 6, 2021 Thoughts and prayers. Promises of “never again.” They are not enough. Seven years after ISIS committed genocide against the Yazidi community, my ethno-religious minority, in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of people remain internally displaced and more than 2,800 women and children remain missing. Shelter, clean water, health care and education are luxuries, if available at all. Those …

July 7, 2021 JOE PARKINSON AND DREW HINSHAW| They were the world’s most famous hostages, yet no one seemed to know what it had taken to bring them home or how they had survived. Members of the class of 2014 at Nigeria’s Chibok Government Secondary School for Girls had been just a few weeks from finishing their senior year—just a …

June 8, 2021 JAYSON CASPER Secretary of State Antony Blinken called out Saudi Arabia. The Gulf kingdom “remains the only country in the world without a Christian church, though there are more than a million Christians living [there],” he stated yesterday. Such high-level criticism of the key US ally is a departure from the foreign policy of the Trump administration, …

March 9, 2021 David Eubanks of Free Burma Rangers shares this disturbing story. We walked into a small jungle clearing to see children sitting under the trees reading their lessons. They were intensively focused on their books and learning their subjects. One little boy was reading an English lesson and one girl looked up from her reading and gave us …

November 18, 2020 ByEmma Hodges, 21Wilberforce Fall Associate This year, 21Wilberforce awards Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback its 3rd annual Frank Wolf Award for International Religious Freedom. While in Congress, former Representative Frank Wolf was a tireless advocate for religious freedom. In like manner, this award honors those who champion freedom of conscience around the world. Ambassador Brownback …

September 22, 2020 A Uyghur Muslim woman who was forced into a Chinese ‘re-education center’ so she could teach the inmates has revealed the full horror of life at the prison camp after she escaped. Sayragul Sauytbay, 43, was forced to spend five months at one of the camps in Xinjiang province between 2017 and 2018 where she taught other …

May 14, 2020 Refugees, who face impossible situations even in better times, are being pushed beyond human endurance by the coronavirus pandemic. By Susan Korah “It has always seemed to me that what I write about is humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable, and that it is important to tell people what really happens in wars …” – Marie Colvin, …

February 27, 2020 Dr. Abdullah Hashi Abib, Founder and Executive Director of the Rass Institute for Policy Analysis, a non-partisan policy think tank in Mogadishu, grew up in Somalia. The country was ravaged by civil war which left his family committed to do what they could to rebuild their country. They helped launch a university. They raised money to rebuild medical …

December 16, 2019 “My parents were raised in a traditional Chinese family who practiced Buddhism. Their marriage was arranged and during that time a husband and wife were separated forcefully by the Chinese government. My father was sent to work in a remote province 4,000 miles away and he was only allowed to see my mother 15 days a year. …

November 11, 2019 Machiko Sato was born and raised in Japan where she is a professor in the School of International Relations at the University of Shizuoka. Among the courses she teaches are Cold War history, US government, and U.S. foreign policy. During a recent sabbatical, Machiko came to the U.S. to conduct research and study at Georgetown University. Her …

April 12, 2019 Sunday, April 14, marks the day five years ago that Boko Haram kidnapped 276 Chibok schoolgirls in Borno State, Nigeria. Fifty-seven girls escaped in the first 24 hours, and in the last five years, 164 girls have been found, escaped, or were released after negotiations. Sadly, the terrorists still hold 112 Chibok girls, including Dorcas.  At 15 …

March 28, 2019 Nadia Murad had dreams of being a teacher, not a sabia — not a slave. In one horrific August afternoon in 2014, ISIS terrorists invaded her village in Northern Iraq and shattered those dreams. The militants slaughtered hundreds of Nadia’s neighbors in a single hour, including six of her brothers and stepbrothers. She and the other young women who remained were …

February 12, 2109 Religious persecution is on the rise around the world according to data from the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, the U.S. State Department, Freedom House, and Open Doors among others. Former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom David Saperstein says “enemies of religious freedom have grown alarmingly strong worldwide. We are confronted with the fierce urgency …

January 31, 2019 Nigeria’s upcoming presidential election on February 16 was cast into doubt late last week when President Muhammadu Buhari suspended the country’s chief justice on the eve of the appointment of new election judges. The action is the latest threat to what many have hoped would be a reprise of the successful 2015 election. In response to this …