Chunchon Diocese realized a long-term dream when it opened a pastoral centre to offer faith education and cultural events to Catholics living in this isolated area of South Korea.
The diocese held the blessing ceremony for its Yeongdong Catholic Pastoral Centre in the coastal city of Gangneung’s Juminjin harbour on March 31. Bishop Lucas Kim Un-hoe of Chunchon presided over the ceremony.

The seeds of Catholic faith were sown in Yeongdong some 100 years ago. However, as most of the pastoral events were held in Chuncheon, the city where the  diocese is based, Catholics from other areas could not join because the diocese is divided by two mountain ridges. Bishop Kim said, “This area lacks venues for education and it was hard to offer programs here. The new centre will appease the thirst of the faithful.” From April, the centre will offer classes on the Bible, Catechism and a reading forum. It will also offer monthly lecture programs.

Jailed Christian attorney Nguyen Van Dai received an award by the German Association of Judges on April 5 for his efforts to defend human rights in Vietnam.

Dai, who has been held incommunicado at a prison in Hanoi, was the first Vietnamese lawyer to win the Human Rights Prize for fighting for a democratic and liberal future in the communist country, said Deutscher Richter-bund (German Association of Judges) the largest professional organization of judges and public prosecutors in Germany.

“The path to democracy in Vietnam is still long and needs people like Dai,” the organization said.

On April 4, Dai’s wife, Vu Minh Khanh, was stopped at Noi Bai Airport so she couldn’t fly to Germany to receive the award. She was told that she was not able to leave the country until 2019.

Vu Quoc Dung, the chairman of the human rights organization “Veto! Human Rights Defenders’ Network” based in German, received the award on Dai’s behalf.

Dai, 47, and his assistant Le Thu Ha were arrested in December 2015 for being accused of conducting “propaganda against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” after he had held a workshop on basic human rights at the house of a former political prisoner in Nghe An Province.

Authorities in the northeastern Chinese province of Liaoning have formally arrested two South Korean Protestant pastors accused of trying to help North Koreans flee across the border into China.

Neither pastor has been named. One was arrested along with his wife in February as they tried to board a plane for South Korea from Qingdao in the eastern province of Shandong, while the second was detained at a hotel in the northeastern city of Qinhua-ngdao, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported.

While both wives have since been released, the two pastors remain in police detention.

Peter Chung, spokesman for the human rights group Justice for North Korea, said their families have hired lawyers to represent the pastors, now that the cases look set to proceed to trial.

“The cases are now with the state prosecutor’s office; all the files are with the prosecutor now,” Chung told RFA on April 5. “This was approved on March 29.”

Scores of Christians facing trial over the lynching of two suspected terrorists after two church bombings in 2015 are being forced to convert to Islam in return for their acquittal, activists said. Nearly 60 Christians are on trial for the mob killing of two men mistaken for militants shortly after two Taliban bombers attacked worshipers at the Roman Catholic Church and Christ Church in Youhanabad in Lahore on March 15, 2015.

The bombings resulted in death of 15 people while 72 others were wounded. Angry protesters managed to grab two suspects from police, beat and lynch them to death. They were later identi-fied as passers-by.

More than 100 Christians were rounded up in the wake of the incident and put on trial. Centre for Legal Aid, Assistance and Settlement (CLAAS), an inter-denominational organisation working for persecuted Christians in the country, said that Prose-cutor Syed Anees Shah offered Christians acquittal if they agreed to convert to Islam.

“How can we expect justice when people sitting in courts are inwardly biased? We demand that the government takes action against the public prosecutor,” Sohail Habel, a member of CLAAS told ucanews.com.

“In my 13 years of human rights activism, I have seen many such offers made to non-Muslim prisoners,” he said, adding that a CLAAS legal team was support-ing the victims and trying to dissuade them from capitulating.

Pakistan prosecutor removed from Christian case

A Pakistani prosecutor who tried to push Christians into converting to Islam in exchange for an acquittal in a lynching trial has been removed from the case, activists said. Pakistani media reported that Deputy District Public Prosecutor Syed Anees Shah told 42 Christian prisoners before an anti-terrorism court in Lahore that he could “guarantee their acquittal” if they converted to Islam.