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April 1, 2021
Dear John,
Each month, FRC's Center for Religious Liberty covers top international religious freedom news -- exploring challenges that believers face abroad.
Here are some of FRC's top stories in international religious freedom this month.
Pakistan:
When 13-year-old Shakaina Masih's mother arrived to take her home from the job at which she helped with housework, she was informed that her daughter had already left. When Shakaina never showed up, concern soon became alarm as her parents urgently filed a missing person report. After initially delaying to respond, police informed Shakaina's parents that she had converted to Islam and married a Muslim man last month.
Devastated to learn that their teenage daughter was supposedly married to a man whose name they had never even heard, Shakaina's parents believe she was abducted. "Shakaina is just a kid," Shakaina's father, Johnson Masih told Morning Star News. "She was kidnapped and taken to Okara, where they forcibly converted her and conducted the fake marriage to give it a religious cover." Many Christian parents in Pakistan fear exactly this occurrence -- and it is all too common.
Hundreds of girls from Christian and Hindu backgrounds are kidnapped each year and forcibly converted before being raped and often forced to live as their abductor's wives. Widespread discrimination and the government's failure to protect religious freedom creates an environment that enables horrific incidences of forced marriage to thrive. Islamic clerics who solemnize underage marriages, magistrates who make the marriages legal, and corrupt authorities who refuse to investigate all contribute to the problem.
For more on this issue and what the United States can do about it, check out Family Research Council's new publication titled, "Combatting Forced Marriage of Young Women in Pakistan."
Africa:
Hardly a day passes without accounts of mass kidnappings of Nigerian schoolchildren, Christian clergy and aid workers gunned down, villages torched, or churchgoers massacred. Africa is in trouble, and the United States and other global leaders must wake up to the horrifying levels of violence suffocating Nigeria and other countries in Africa. Read more in Lela's op-ed in Newsweek.
China:
In coordination with the United States, new sanctions were placed on several Chinese officials responsible for atrocities in Xinjiang by the United Kingdom, European Union, and Canada. In retaliation, China decided to sanction two U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCRIF) Commissioners, including FRC President Tony Perkins.
"The Chinese Communist Party's sanctions are nothing but tactics of intimidation, designed to help them save face in an international community that's denounced their brutal and repressive policies," Perkins said. It is telling that while Western countries sanction Chinese officials over human rights abuses, China sanctions individuals who merely speak out in defense of the oppressed.
See FRC's resources:
What we're working on:
We recently started an "International Religious Freedom 101" series on the FRC Blog. Check out our second installment, "Pakistan Is Captive to Islamist Mob Rule." Stay tuned for more!
In His Name,
Lela Gilbert
Senior Fellow for International Religious Freedom
Arielle Del Turco
Assistant Director of the Center for Religious Liberty
"Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them..."
Hebrews 13:3
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