JUBILEE CAMPAIGN PRESS RELEASE

For immediate release

April 25th 2002

JUBILEE LOBBIES AT U.N. FOR PERSECUTED CHRISTIANS AND STREET CHILDREN

The British based human rights group, Jubilee Campaign, has called on the U.N Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Switzerland, to put strong pressure on the Indonesian government to remove all members of the Islamic extremist group, Laskar Jihad, from Sulawesi, the Moluccas and West Papua and to detain and prosecute their leader, Jafar Umar Thalib. Laskar Jihad has been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Christians in the Moluccas and Sulawesi. Over 300 copies of a written statement by Jubilee regarding the persecution of Christians in Indonesia and Vietnam were distributed to government delegates and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) at the 58th Session of the UN Human Rights Commission which ends tomorrow.

The Jubilee statement also urged the U.N Human Rights Commission to call on the Indonesian government to urgently evacuate the thousands of Christians forced to convert to Islam in Halmahera, Bacan, Buru and Seram islands in the Moluccas.

The second part of Jubilee’s statement described the escalating persecution including religious persecution against the Montagnard hilltribes of Vietnam’s Central Highlands. The Montagnards, most of whom are Christians, have been persecuted by the Vietnamese government for many years because they assisted the U.S Army during the Vietnam war and because of their Christian faith.

Jubilee Campaign informed the Commission that there was a massive crackdown against the Montagnard people in the Central Highlands in December last year. Large numbers of Montagnard Christians were rounded up and arrested while trying to organise Christmas services. Vietnamese soldiers and police have been systematically forcing Montagnard Christians to renounce their faith and to drink pig’s blood. Drinking pig’s blood was a pre-Christian religious practice among the Montagnards of the Central Highlands and this is further evidence of an attempt by the Vietnamese authorities to destroy their Christian faith.

Many Montagnards have fled to Cambodia seeking sanctuary but several have been forcibly repatriated including 63 who were sent back to Vietnam on March 2nd this year. Jubilee’s written statement called on the U.N Human Rights Commission to put pressure on the Vietnamese government to stop their persecution of the Montagnards and to urge the Cambodian authorities to respect international law and stop their forced repatriation of refugees from Vietnam.

In an oral statement to the U.N Human Rights Commission, Jubilee Campaign highlighted the plight of street children and juvenile detainees in many parts of the world. Jubilee informed the Commission that in some countries including Brazil, Guatemala and Honduras, “street children have frequently been regarded as no better than vermin and have been murdered simply because they were considered a nuisance and not having lives worth living………….Besides murder, torture, exploitation and hunger, one of the serious problems which many street children have to cope with is being periodically picked up by the police and detained in appalling prison conditions.” Jubilee described the terrible conditions for juvenile detainees in Brazil, Honduras, the Philippines, India and Mongolia and urged the U.N Commission to concentrate more attention on the plight of juvenile detainees worldwide and to appoint a U.N Special Rapporteur on Street Children to speak out for the estimated 100 million street kids around the world.

In exercising their right of reply at the U.N Human Rights Commission, the Honduran government denied that there has been any “social extermination” of street children and said they were engaged in a programme of national development, including the development of children’s rights.

Jubilee raised with the Jordanian government delegation and the office of the U.N Special Rapportuer on Religious Intolerance, the urgent case of Mrs. Siham Jabrin, a Jordanian Christian mother whose children, who are also Christians, are at risk of being taken away from her and raised as Muslims because her late husband had converted to Islam.

Jubilee also raised the desperate plight of the Sudanese Christian convert from a Muslim background, Aladin Omer Mohammed, with the U.N Special Rapporteur on Sudan. Aladin Omer Mohammed has been harassed, beaten and injected with drugs by the Sudanese secret police simply because of his Christian conversion and is currently in hiding. The U.N Special Rapporteur on Sudan agreed that this was a serious and urgent case and promised to raise it with the Sudanese authorites. In addition, Jubilee Campaign lobbied the offices of 3 U.N Special Rapporteurs, who cover the Right to Food, Burma and Extrajudicial Executions, regarding the genocide by the Burmese regime against the Karen, Karenni and Shan ethnic minorities of Burma. All 3 U.N Special Rapporteurs were urged by Jubilee to focus more attention on the desperate plight of the Karen, Karenni and Shan and to try to visit the areas where the atrocities have been occuring.

Together with members of the Committee for Investigation on Persecution of Religion in China, Jubilee Campaign held a press conference at the Geneva Press Club in Switzerland, to draw attention to their report, “Religion and National Security in China: Secret documents from China’s security sector”. This report contains English translations of original secret documents issued by the Ministry of Public Security in China. These documents constitute hard evidence of the Chinese government’s deliberate policy of persecution against religious groups such as Protestants and Catholics who refuse to join the government controlled official religious organisations. The documents include government exhortations to the police to use surveillance and infiltration to combat such religious groups.

These documents were smuggled out of China at great risk, to expose the Chinese government’s harsh and systematic policy of religious persecution. Jubilee also distributed over 50 copies of the report on the Chinese secret documents to numerous government delegations and NGOs at the U.N Human Rights Commission, urging them to increase the pressure on the Chinese government to stop these human rights violations.

Wilfred Wong, Jubilee’s Researcher and Parliamentary Officer, says, ” The U.N Human Rights Commission has been called ‘the Conscience of the United Nations’ and our role is to prick that international conscience on a wide range of human rights issues.”

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For further information you can contact Wilfred Wong on +44-20-7219 5129.

Jubilee Campaign is an interdenominational Christian human rights group which has worked with over 150 British Parliamentarians on human rights issues in countries all over the world including Egypt, India, Pakistan, Burma, China, Indonesia, Mongolia and Brazil.