Page 19 - Conscientious Objection News Today

Kazakhstan maintains public lists of individuals and organisations allegedly connected to "terrorism or extremism" list, and secret "high-risk" or "suspicious" organisation lists circulated to banks. Both lists lead to blocking and denial of bank accounts and numerous other problems. "Weve written more than 10 letters to various state agencies," Protestant Pastor Pyotr Shelepanov of New Life Church in Talgar told Forum 18. "But weve had no real answer...

A St Petersburg court is due to hear the case on 25 November of Danara Erendzhenova, who held up a poster outside the citys Buddhist temple. "Militarism is very expensive – Dalai Lama XIV", it read, which police claim "discredits" Russias armed forces. A Chita court fined Vitaly Goryachikh two weeks average local wage for an anti-war poster which cited "I will fear no evil" from Psalm 23. They are among at least 26 known such prosecutions for opposing Russias ...

Five Sunni Muslims jailed in Balkanabat for 12 years each in August 2017 for meeting to study the works of the theologian Said Nursi were transferred recently to new labour camps. The strict-regime labour camp at Bayramali in Mary Region, where four of the five are held, also holds another jailed Nursi reader, 47-year-old Begench Dadebayew. At least two among more than 60 men jailed from 2013 for participating in a Sunni Muslim group in Turkmenabat have been freed after completing their jail ter...

The regime closed all Islamic bookshops in Dushanbe in August and September, as well as some publishers of Islamic literature. The regime has also continued demands that non-Muslim religious communities complete intrusive questionnaires. Some suggested family information is being collected "so that it will be easy to identify us and our family members if in future they decide to target us". "All mosques are under total state control," human rights defenders observed, "so...

On 3 August, days after the secret police arrested him, Badakhshan Regional Court jailed Muzaffar Davlatmirov, a respected 58-year-old Ismaili religious leader, for 5 years for alleged "public calls for extremist activity". "Davlatmirov is not an extremist, and did not call for extremist activity," a local person who knows him told Forum 18. His relatives and friends do not know where he is serving his sentence. The regime has closed all Ismaili prayer houses in the region an...

Visiting the closed Catholic Church of Saints Simon and Helena (Red Church) in central Minsk on 12 October, the day the parish was ordered to remove its property, Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, retired Archbishop of Minsk-Mogilev, "was crying from the hopelessness of the situation". The worship ban and enforced closure followed a "strange and ambiguous" early-morning fire on 26 September in a small annexe. "Despite the small area of damage, the entire church is sealed and not ac...

Medea Benjamin and Ariel Gold say the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize missed a chance to help end a war so dangerous that Biden is warning of "nuclear Armageddon.”  By Medea Benjamin  and Ariel Gold Common Dreams In what was described as a harsh rebuke of Russia, the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was awa

New Age, a Dhaka-based leading English language daily newspaper, is a major source of news of Bangladesh and international affairs

In what was described as a harsh rebuke of Russia, the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil - Ariel Gold for Antiwar.com Original

In what was described as a harsh rebuke of Russia, the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties, along with Belarusian human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski and the Russian human rights organization Memorial. While at first glance, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties might sound like