Belarus

Two Danish visitors to Belarus were detained by police and are being deported as they expressed "ideas of a religious nature", in the words of the deportation order.

Members of Minsk's charismatic New Life Church have vowed to fight on to retain their building after the Higher Economic Court threw out their appeal against moves to seize it.

"The views of the parishioners are nothing to us – he was invited by the Archdiocese, not by the parishioners."

Three Catholic priests in the western Grodno Diocese, and one priest and three nuns in the Minsk-Mohilov Archdiocese face a ban on religious work in Belarus from 1 January 2009.

The Ukrainian founder of one of the largest charismatic churches in the Belarusian capital Minsk was deported on 16 October due to his religious activity.

Belarus has banned a Christian music festival, initiated by Catholics, minutes before it was due to begin.

Fr Ioann Grudnitsky – who has already been fined for conducting services without state registration – faced further intimidation when he conducted the funeral of a parishioner.

Officials have tried to stop three different Protestant communities in Grodno Region, north-western Belarus, from conducting peaceful religious activity.

A Belarusian Christian has been fined the equivalent of nine months minimum wage salary for attempting to organise an informal Bible study and discussion group.

A court in Belarus has handed down a fine of 700,000 Belarusian Roubles to Vladimir Burshtyn, a Baptist who "organised choir singing and conducted conversations on religious topics" outside a public market.

Over 50,000 people in the former Soviet republic of Belarus, many of them Christians, have signed a daring petition calling for a revision of what is seen as Europe's most restrictive religious legislation.

The current state authorities of Belarus, which was once a country that people from Western Europe would flee to in order to escape religious persecution, have been trying to restrict the Belarusians citizens’ religious freedom for the past decade. Pastor Antoni Bokun discusses the events that occurred to create this change in religious freedom.

Today's KGB secret police have sought to have icons of the New Martyrs, as they are known by the Orthodox Church, removed from Grodno Cathedral.

Three human rights defenders have been punished for organising the mass petition to challenge the 2002 Religion Law. The three were each fined two months' average wages in late April.

As Minsk Catholics marked a third year of daily prayer vigils outside the monastery's St Joseph Church, however, there is still no sign that the government intends to fulfil a 17-year-old promise to return the building to believers.

Pavel Nozdrya, a member of the charismatic Jesus Christ Church in the southern city of Mozyr who helped gather signatures on a religious freedom petition, lost his job as an electrician at the local university in mid-March.

Political prisoner Andrei Kim has had "no response whatsoever" to his request for a visit by a Protestant pastor.

"Every time they check, there is something new. Even if we were to fulfil everything now, there's no guarantee they won't come up with something more."

The Plenipotentiary for Religious and Ethnic Affairs now also has the right not to give reasons for refusing a foreign religious worker's visit, and to shorten a visit "if the period of time required for realisation of the aims for which the foreign citizen is invited does not correspond to that requested."

Belarus has stepped up pressure on the Baptist Council of Churches, issuing a spate of fines for unregistered religious activity.