The right to believe, to worship and witness
The right to change one’s belief or religion
The right to join together and express one’s belief
5 November 2004
BELARUS: Charismatic congregations barred from meeting
Ongoing state obstruction of the worship services of the charismatic Full Gospel Association appears to make the concept of state registration under the repressive religion law meaningless. The deadline for the compulsory re-registration of all religious organisations is 17 November 2004. In Minsk for example, Forum 18 News Service has learnt that Pastor Andrei Sidor has been fined more than the average monthly salary for "violating regulations on holding religious events," by holding a service in his own home. Even though Pastor Sidor's congregation has state registration, the fine could still be upheld, as the authorities have not given him the approval from fire safety and sanitation officers which the religion law requires. Pastor Boris Chernoglaz of the Church of Jesus Christ told Forum 18 that "The authorities know that it is a serious trial for a church not to be able to gather together, that's why they do this." Many members of Belarus' religious minorities fear the consequences of the government implementing the repressive 2002 religion law.
2 November 2004
RUSSIA: Is State's treatment of southern Muslims unjust?
Mufti Ismail Berdiyev, who belongs to the presidential Council for Co-operation with Religious Organisations, has told Forum 18 News Service that he supports "the general idea of attacking Wahhabism and terrorism," but cannot fully endorse every anti-terrorist measure. "Some state officials don't know the first thing about religion and go too far," he remarked, "we don't accept their mistakes." In the area he comes from, the authorities compile lists of suspected "Wahhabis". "I'm opposed to that," he told Forum 18, "if people are conducting terrorist activity then they should be prosecuted." Local imams state that there is an Islamic militant problem, but imam Magomed Erkenov told Forum 18 that the problem's scale did not warrant negative treatment of the entire Muslim community. Commenting on those fighting in Chechnya, he told Forum 18 that "They may have said that they were fighting against Russia, but if paid they would have fought against Muslims, or their own relatives. There is nothing holy about that war."
1 November 2004
RUSSIA: Southern Muslims complain of fall-out from anti-terrorist moves
Since the start of the second Chechen conflict, Islamic representatives maintain to Forum 18 News Service that a "negative policy towards all Muslims" in parts of the northern Caucasus has intensified. Imam Magomed Erkenov, who oversees 15 mosques in the southern Karachai-Cherkessia republic, told Forum 18 that since 1999 it has become "much harder" to register new Muslim communities. Officials visit mosques about twice a month to conduct interrogations of worshippers, Erkenov stated, on one occasion accusing a worshipper of being a Wahhabi and arresting him. An imam in a neighbouring mosque, speaking of visits by officials, told Forum 18 that "people are afraid to be seen to be Muslim now." Regional religious affairs official Yevgeni Kratov insisted to Forum 18 that mosque check-ups take place "entirely within the framework of the law" and entail neither searches nor abuses of any kind. "A police officer might drop by and take an interest, especially following a terrorist attack," he explained.
20 October 2004
BELARUS: Police deny beating Baptist and religious minorities fear fresh repression
Police in the town of Lepel [Lyepyel'] have angrily denied beating up a Baptist street evangelist, however the police have admittedly repeatedly detaining Baptists who were running a street library. The detentions allegedly took place at the instigation of the local Orthodox priest wife. Religious minorities fear that, after the strongly disputed referendum and parliamentary elections this week, the government's attention will turn to implementing Belarus' repressive religion law, under which all religious activity by unregistered religious communities is illegal. Cardinal Kazimierz Swiatek of Minsk-Mohilev, the latest religious leader to criticise the law, has described some of the law's restrictions and said that "This law appears to normalise relations between the State and the Church, but does it in a way that suits the State, not the Church."
11 October 2004
CHINA: Xinjiang - Linked religious practice and state control levels?
China maintains few controls on religious life in the mountainous Altai [Altay] region in the far north of Xinjiang, Forum 18 News Service has noted, apparently because there are only low levels of Islamic, Buddhist, Pagan, Orthodox and Pentecostal Christian religious practice among the majority ethnic Kazakhs, as well as among Chinese and most other local minorities. In contrast, Forum 18 has observed strict controls in nearby mosques amongst the Muslim Dungan people, and the visit of a Russian Orthodox priest, Fr Vianor Ivanov, was met by the authorities arresting him, as well as questioning virtually all the several dozen elderly Orthodox believers in the city Fr Ivanov visited, before deporting him.
27 September 2004
NORTH KOREA: Will local Orthodox dare to regularly attend new church?
Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, has two Protestant and one Catholic church, which are suspected of being "show churches" for display to foreigners, so it remains unclear whether any North Koreans will be able to or will dare to regularly attend an Orthodox church under construction. The building is funded by the North Korean state, and Forum 18 News Service has learnt that it is "65 per cent finished". By the early 1900s, about 10,000 Koreans had converted to Orthodoxy due to Russian missionaries in the now divided Korean peninsula. Dmitry Petrovsky, of the Moscow Patriarchate's Department for External Church Relations, expressed the hope to Forum 18 that links with this past missionary activity remain, as is the case with Orthodox churches in South Korea. Four North Koreans are studying at the Moscow Theological Seminary, and Petrovsky remarked to Forum 18 that they are displaying "zeal and a genuine interest in Orthodoxy".
22 September 2004
RUSSIA: Suspicious fire guts Baptist church after authorities break up meeting
As Baptists were putting up a tent on privately-rented land in a village near Moscow on 20 August, administration officials demanded they provide advance notice of their two-day meeting. The Baptists refused, arguing that they did not need to for a non-political event. Several hundred armed police and secret police officers, "prepared as if for a terrorist attack" as Pastor Nikolai Dudenkov told Forum 18 News Service, invaded the site after the local administration banned the event. Workers pulled down the tent, but 4,000 Baptists went ahead with the meeting under police surveillance. On 10 September, local Baptist Yelena Kareyev told Forum 18, her teenage sons saw one of the officers involved in the raid lurking in woods behind their church. Three days later the building went up in flames and Kareyev saw men running away. She said the fire brigade was in no hurry to put out the fire.
22 September 2004
CHINA: Will Orthodox Christians soon be allowed priests?
China's estimated 3,000 scattered Orthodox Christians may soon be able to have their own priests once again. Since 2003, 18 Chinese Orthodox have been studying in Orthodox seminaries in Russia with the permission of China's State Administration of Religious Affairs. "Now they are happy for Chinese to become priests," an Orthodox source from Shanghai told Forum 18 News Service. But Hong Kong-based Russian Orthodox priest Fr Dionisy Pozdnyayev told Forum 18 it has yet to be decided whether these seminarians will be allowed to become priests in China when they complete their theological education. Fr Dionisy can minister only to foreign citizens in Beijing and Shenzhen, but a Russian priest spent two weeks in June ministering to local Orthodox in Harbin with official permission.
14 September 2004
RUSSIA: Increasing crackdown on Muslim "extremist" books
Muslims have complained to Forum 18 News Service of increased scrutiny of their literature, often by "specialists" who know nothing of Islam. Among reasons given for banning an eighteenth century book by the Arabian founder of Wahhabism, a Moscow court ruled in April that it "disputes the truth" of atheism, Sufism and monasticism. After confiscating religious literature from two Muslim communities in the Urals in 2002, officials "didn't find anything which would form the basis of a criminal case - they were prayer books, introductions to Islam and commentaries on the Koran," one leader told Forum 18. Accusations that a Muslim community is "extremist" – and therefore liable for banning under Russia's 2002 extremism law – reportedly often originate from rival Muslim jurisdictions, and are taken up by the FSB secret police and prosecutors. "The law is very frequently used by officials as a convenient instrument for exerting pressure on Muslims," Sheikh Nafigulla Ashirov of the Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of Asian Russia told Forum 18.
7 September 2004
BELARUS: Was Baptist fine an "exception"?
Although unregistered religious communities still face intermittent fines for religious activities, Protestants in Belarus have told Forum 18 News Service that a fine imposed in January on Baptist Union member Yuri Denishchik for holding a religious meeting in a private home was an "exception". They say that ahead of October's parliamentary elections, the authorities are not currently interfering in services, open-air evangelistic meetings and youth camps held by registered Protestant communities. "There are a lot of active Protestants in Belarus and President Lukashenko can't afford to alienate them right now," one source told Forum 18. He assumed there to be "some kind of instruction not to touch Protestants at the moment". But senior Baptist pastor Gennadi Brutsky told Forum 18 that problems persist, though so far they have been solved through compromises.
2 September 2004
BELARUS: Baptists to lose property after Easter hospital visit
Two Baptists are set to have personal property confiscated - in one case a car - while a third is having his pay docked after the three visited a hospital at Easter to sing hymns and hand out New Testaments, Forum 18 News Service has learnt. Local regional religious affairs official Vladimir Klevtsov told Forum 18 that the Baptists had broken the law because - amongst other violations - they did not get the hospital authorities' permission to hold "a mass event with music and give out literature". Their other offences included the fact that two of the Baptists are from Brest, which is outside the region where the hospital is located, and that they do not belong to a registered church. Asked by Forum 18 what the legal position is for individual Belarusian believers wishing to visit or give religious literature to hospital patients, Klevtsov said that he knew of no such precedent, as "we normally get requests only from registered religious organisations."
2 September 2004
COMMENTARY: Away with legal discrimination - Serbia shouldn't follow Austria
The Serbian draft law on religion follows Austria's hastily passed 1998 law in dividing religious communities into different categories with differing legal rights, thus institutionalising religious discrimination, comments Dr. Reinhard Kohlhofer, an Austrian lawyer specialising in religious freedom, in this personal commentary for Forum 18 News Service http://www.forum18.org. The Austrian law is a bad example for Serbia to follow, Dr. Kohlhofer argues, having been severely criticised by international lawyers, and also being the subject of a European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) case, with a decision expected in the next few months. In a 1993 case involving Greece, the ECtHR ruled that "freedom of thought, conscience and religion is one of the foundations of a democratic society" and that "the pluralism indissociable from a democratic society .. depends on it." Dr. Kohlhofer goes on to state that there is no justification for states to legally discriminate between or against religious communities, and that democracy demands nothing less than the elimination of all forms of legal discrimination.