Exasperated after violent interrogations and round-the-clock intimidation at the hands of the Vietnamese government, Y-Man Eban escaped into the forests of eastern Cambodia on July 7, 2015.

“The reason I ran away from my country was that the Vietnamese police interrogated me four or five times and put me in jail for a week. They beat me a lot,” Eban, 30, a Montagnard Christian, said from Dak Lak province.

Asked why he was arrested, Eban said it was because he sought “the freedom and independence for Dega people.”

Eban was one of more than 300 Montagnard Christians, the indigenous peoples of the Vietnamese Central Highlands, also known as Dega, who started fleeing into Cambodia three years ago. They there told of oppression at the hands of the Hanoi government.

The latest exodus is the first in about a decade when thousands fled amid crackdowns on protests in 2001 and 2004.  Persecuted for decades due to reasons such as their support for America in the Vietnam War and their faith, there have been widespread accusations of human rights abuses and land grabs in the rolling hills of the Montagnards’ homeland. “Since I came back to Vietnam, the authorities have viewed me as a criminal,” Eban said.

China will convene its 19th Party Congress on Oct. 18, a key meeting held every five years where President Xi Jinping is expected to receive a second term as the ruling Communist Party’s top leader.

For China’s religious minorities, to say that it has been a difficult year would be an understatement. The government is quickly transforming the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region into a police state while new laws now mostly restrict the Tibetan region from access to the world outside of China.

But following the 19th Party Congress beginning this month — where Chinese President Xi Jinping will reshuffle his government, selecting the core leadership on the Politburo — human rights monitors fear that, given the current trajectory of the Chinese government, the situation for the country’s religious minorities may become even more tumultuous.

A delegation of Catholic Bishops from Australia has gathered in the Vatican to discuss “restoration of trust” as the country’s most senior Catholic faces allegations of sexual abuse.

The Vatican disclosed the meeting in a statement released on October 7th. The delegation included Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisban, Archbishop Denis Hart of Melbourne, and Justice Neville Owen of the Truth, Justice and Healing Council.

That council is coordinating the church’s response to an Australian government inquiry into child sex abuse in various institutions.

The bishops’ delegation discussed “the relationship between the church and society at large, the restoration of trust, and greater participation of the laity in decision-making roles in the church,” the statement said.

Cardinal George Pell, the Vatican’s economy minister, attended a pre-trial court hearing in Melbourne on October 6th over allegations of historical sex offenses.

No details of the allegations have been made public. Cardinal Pell faces a committal hearing in March which will determine whether the case goes to trial.

Police officers in the Philippines wishing to expose the full extent of the government’s anti-drug killing spree have approached the Church for protection, according to the outgoing president of the country’s bishops’ conference.

“Law enforcers have come forward confidentially to us, their spiritual leaders, to seek sanctuary, succor and protection,” said Archbishop Socrates Villegas of Lingayen-Dagupan.

“They have expressed their desire to come out in the open about their participation in extrajudicial killings and summary executions.”

Her parents’ religion did not prevent Evangeline Musaling-Pacinabo to embrace the Catholic faith and help spread the Good News on a remote island in the southern Philippines.

Evangeline’s Muslim parents migrated from Indonesia to the small island of Balut in the southern province of Davao Occidental in the 1940s, during the height of World War II.

As years passed, some of the migrants and their children became Catholics with the blessing of their non-Catholic parents. “A catechist was instrumental in my embracing the faith,” said Evan-geline, who later married a Filipino, and became a catechist.

For the past 22 years, Evangeline has been going around the remote municipality and its nearby islets to share her experience with people and teach them about the faith.

Balut is the sleepy centre of the Sarangani island group that can only be reached after a nine-hour boat ride from General Santos City, the nearest urban centre in Mindanao. The 24,000 population of the island comprises of Muslims and members of the B’laan tribe who mostly rely on fishing and coconut farming to survive.

It is around the fringes of this municipality that Evangeline shares the teachings she learned from seminars and workshops she attended in the parish church.

For the past three weeks, the world has watched aghast as Myanmar’s military has carried out the latest, most deadly phase of a five-year operation against the Muslim Rohingya people who number about 1.1-1.3 million.

It has been an outrageously outsized reaction by Myanmar’s notorious military, known as the Tatmadaw, to a small attack by what is, thus far, a threadbare insurgency that has taken clearer shape as the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army. It’s o15f little surprise that the Rohingya, who have suffered waves of persecution and terrorisation by Myanmar’s military, and Burma’s before it, for countless decades, have finally decided to fight back. That is now being used as an excuse for what the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has called a textbook case of ethnic cleansing. In forcing roughly half the Rohingya population from their homes, it’s hard to call it anything else.

At the same time, the world has been bewildered, then dismayed, as arguably the most internationally (and domestically) beloved Nobel Peace Prize Laureate since Nelson Mandela, Myanmar’s state counsellor, foreign minister and de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi has remained all but silent. When she has opened her mouth, it has only been to put her foot in it by introducing red herrings such as the alleged complicity of NGOs in the insurgency. She remains unable, for largely political reasons, to utter the word Rohingya or even to make comments of any concern about the fate of the latest victims of one of the world’s most murderous militaries.

Communist authorities are continuing to tighten their grip on practising Christians with at least four regional governments across China issuing notices that restrict children from joining Christian groups and attending religious activities.

The ban includes turning children away from churches even if they attend with their parents and teachers. Additionally, the ban includes promises that officials will launch investigations into both government approved churches and underground congregations who operate outside the tightly controlled official Beijing-run Catholic and Protestant churches.

The latest move comes as part of a concerted crackdown on religion that began with a three-year cross removal campaign in the Christian stronghold province of Zhejiang. The state’s move against religions became official last year when Chinese leader Xi Jinping instituted formal plans to “sinicize” religion with the intention of bringing more religious followers under the control of the ruling Communist Party, which itself is officially atheist and forbids members from practising.

“An emergency notice from the higher authorities strictly forbids all secondary and primary school teachers, students and toddlers to join Catholic or Protestant churches,” the school district of Yonglin in Wenzhou, eastern Zhejiang, said in a note to all primary schools, adult educational institutes and kindergartens.

Maria, a Catholic laywoman in the district who identified herself by her baptismal name, told ucanews.com that about her daughter’s teacher sent an audio and written message to the parents’ chat group “asking us not to bring children to the church.”

The teacher indicated the education bureau issued that instruction while adding that an inspection team would launch open and undercover investigations to find out how many children went to the church.

On Aug. 12, the local street committee office also sent officials to churches to persuade parents not to take their children there. However, Maria said, there were still many children participating in the procession for the feast of the Assumption of Mary, one of the four most important feasts for the China Church, on Aug. 15.

In another incident,  a church-run summer camp that two Protestant classmates of her niece attended, was eventually disbanded and all participants sent home, Maria said.

“The move by the authorities is unnecessary. Even if they are not allowed to go to church, we parents can pass on our religious belief to our kids at home,” Maria said while admitting that recent events had her concerned.

Religious communities in Hindu-majority Nepal need to press for changes to a new law impacting on religious freedom, which is inconsistent with the nation’s international commit-ments. While there has been ongoing discussion of some specific aspects of the law, many Christian leaders have yet to grasp its wider implications.

On Aug. 9, amendments were made to the country’s 164-year-old general criminal code, known as the Muluki Ain. The revised criminal code imposes sanctions for several offences not included in the old law.

Aspects of the new law can be considered as reforms.

However, it also incorporates ‘anti-conversion clauses’ which effectively narrow religious freedom, notably for minorities.

One government repre-sentative previously main-tained that the criminal code amendments would protect freedom of religious belief, but within certain limits.

A critic of this justi-fication compared it to allowing a bird to fly freely, but only within a narrow cage.

In late 2015, Kamal Thapa, then deputy prime minister, maintained that changes to be introduced to the criminal code would ensure full religious freedom.

Bishops in Sri Lanka have condemned a government move to allow abortion in some circumstances. Cabinet has approved presentation of a bill to parliament to legalize abortion when a pregnancy is due to rape or if a fetus is diagnosed with a “lethal” congenital malformation. The Sri Lankan bishops’ conference stressed that the church believes life begins at conception. A person could not safeguard their own rights at the expense of violating somebody else’s rights, said Bishop Valence Mendis of Chilaw, secretary general of the bishops’ conference.

Bishop Mendis, in a joint statement with Bishop J. Winston S.Fernando, president of the bishops’ conference, defended the “right to life” of an unborn child. An estimated 600 illegal abortions take place in Sri Lanka every day, including many in factory zones where large numbers of women work.

Classmates beat a Christian student in Pakistan to death three days after starting his new school because he drank water from a cup meant for Muslim students, his family says. Sheron Masih was a Grade 9 student at a govern-ment-run school in Burewala, in Punjab province.

He was killed because he was a Christian, the student’s father, Elyab Masih, told ucanews.com by phone. “On his first day at his school, a teacher called my son a chuhra and kicked him out of the class for not wearing school uniform,” he said. “My son was so terrified, he skipped school the next day.”

Chuhra is a derogatory term aimed at Christian sanitary workers.

“I bought him a new uniform after which he agreed to return to school. Later in the day I was told that my son was dead after being assaulted by his class-mates,” he said.