Articles

The case of the raid on 28 November 2023 by a SWAT team (Special Weapons Assault Team) on a number of houses and flats where yoga practitioners linked to the MISA yoga school in Romania were gathering for their spiritual retreats had already been covered in this article of 16 April. Now Willy Fautré, director of Human Rights Without Frontiers, traces the incident by analysing the testimonies of 20 unfortunate people who suffered the indignity of the French police raid.

Washington, DC — On August 7, 2024 the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) today released the following new report: Afghanistan Country Update - This country update describes current religious freedom conditions under de facto Taliban authorities, including the introduction and enforcement of strict religious edicts.

Another ruling in favor of the Christian Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses, this time by the Superior Court of Justice of Ontario, Canada, which refutes the thesis dear to the anti-cultists that in the Jehovah's Witnesses – as in other religious minorities – the commission of crimes is implicit, to the point of making them 'systemic'. The Canadian court rightly pointed out that, in the case at hand, the responsibility for the alleged crimes is personal.

The incidents of intolerance against the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light (AROPL), a New Islamic Religious Movement opposed in Muslim-majority countries such as Azerbaijan and Turkey, but also in unsuspected human rights champions such as Sweden, continue. Human Rights Without Frontiers' director Willy Fautré reports in an article reproduced below that in Azerbaijan there have been arrests among AROPL worshippers for being guilty of peacefully expressing their faith in public.

In a recent article, Professor Massimo Introvigne reported on an alarming increase in incidents of violence perpetrated in Japan against members of the Christian Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses and an equally alarming increase – according to Jehovah's Witnesses of up to 638 percent – of hate crimes and hate speeches.

In the Anno Domini 2024, according to the legal system of the states, such a right is not contemplated. On the other hand, there is the military crime of desertion and the impossibility for an individual to opt out of participating in the war event, which, as is known, causes death and destruction. For this reason, Ukrainian citizen Dmytro Zelinsky - a faithful member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church which prohibits the use of weapons - was sentenced to three years in prison. His refusal to participate in the war event is not covered by a person's rights.

Preface, in the Italian version, to the volume Non-believer's Europe: models of secularism, individual statuses, collective rights, edited by A. Orioli, Nessun dogma, Rome, 2019, currently being printed, which collects the proceedings of the Conference, with the same title, organised by the U.A.A.R. and held at the European Parliament (Brussels, 22-23 March 2018). It is published by kind permission of the Publisher Stato, Chiese e pluralismo confessionale.

Paris, June 15, 2024 — A delegation from the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU) Japan has traveled to France to highlight the ongoing crisis of religious freedom in Japan.

Thanks to the enormous and relentless work of Bitter Winter, a magazine specialised in religious freedom and human rights in China, and its editor Professor Massimo Introvigne, more and more believers of the Church of Almighty God (CAG) are finding asylum in Italy.

We had already stigmatised the persecution carried out in Sweden against the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light, a peaceful religious minority that follows the teachings of the Koran, but with beliefs that differ from those of traditional Islam and, therefore, harassed and persecuted.

The anti-cult government agency MIVILUDES (Mission Interministérielle de Vigilance et de Lutte contre les Dérives Sectaires) received another 'slap in the face' from none other than its home court, the Paris Administrative Court, which certified MIVILUDES' malfeasance in packaging and spreading false news on religious minorities - in this case, the Jehovah's Witnesses - contemptuously describing them as 'cults' and attributing to them deviant sectarian behaviours that (...)

"Repeat a lie a hundred, a thousand, a million times and it will become a truth" is a phrase attributed to Nazi hierarch Joseph Goebbels, Minister of the Propaganda of the Third Reich. Whether the attribution is correct or not, this practice is constantly used in all spheres to try to inculcate in others or in the public opinion a certain modus pensandi (way of thinking) and, consequently, a certain modus operandi. It is certainly used by the anti-cultists, as repeatedly reported on this site.

The Protestant community, with more than 170 communities scattered throughout the country and 8,000 adherents, was in the crosshairs. For the judges, expelling or banning entry on the basis of intelligence reports does not constitute a violation of religious practice. A majority decision, opposed by the former president. In the meantime, there is renewed talk of a possible reopening of the Greek Orthodox seminary in Halki in the near future.

On 30 May, Marco Respinti, member of FOB's Advisory Council, took part as a speaker in the international conference “Freedom of Belief and Religious Recognition: Current State and Perspectives”, organized by the Church of Scientology of Rome in collaboration with the Observatory on Religious Entities, Ecclesiastical Heritage and Non-Profit Organizations of Campania University ‘Luigi Vanvitelli’ of Naples.

Documents prove that private anti-cult organizations had a key role in the creation of government documents that caused a surge of hate speech and violence.

by Massimo Introvigne — In June 2023, while peacefully engaging in preaching, a female Jehovah’s Witness in her 70s was assaulted by a 57-year-old man.

Ban on visible symbols of belief in the official education system of the Flemish Community not incompatible with Article 9 of the Convention

Registrar of the European Court (16.05.2024) - In its decision in the case of Mikyas and Others v. Belgium (application no. 50681/20) the European Court of Human Rights has, by a majority, declared the application inadmissible. The decision is final.

The outcry over the new French law that has established the crime of "psychological submission" aimed at "strengthening the fight against sectarian drifts" and, from bad to worse, the crime of incitement to refuse treatment or the adherence to unconventional practices, is not fading. But the most attentive have not missed the fact that the new crime seriously endangers freedom of religion or belief, an old target of French laicity. Also because in all of this there is the unwieldy hand of MIVILUDES. 

While France, through the government agency MIVILUDES, is targeting the followers of MISA Yoga and its spiritual leader Gregorian Bivolaru, Sweden, which has always been seen as a vanguard of tolerance, inclusiveness and human rights, has unexpectedly engaged in persecution of a new Muslim religious movement, the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light. The director of Human Rights Without Frontiers, Willy Fautré gave a detailed account of this, which we publish below.

"The [Orthodox] Church does not appeals for heretics, members of cults or dissidents to be subjected to prosecution. However, the decision to ban Jehovah's Witnesses is to be considered a positive act in the fight against the spread of cultic ideas, which have nothing in common with Christianity." These were the words with which Metropolitan Ilarion of Volokolamsk, chairman of the Council for External Affairs of the Russian Church, greeted the banning of Jehovah's Witnesses occurred in Russia 7 years ago, on April 20, 2017.

Under the pretext that the number of "saisines" (dubious and controversial reports) received by the MIVILUDES was increasing, on November 15, 2023, Sabrina Agresti-Roubache, Minister Delegate for Citizenship and Urban Development in the French government and MIVILUDES superintendent, presented a bill to "strengthen the fight against cultic deviances." Today, thanks to an article in The European Times^® NEWS (reproduced below) signed by Willy Fautré, director o