The EU failed to agree on a statement against the persecution of religious minorities on Monday after Italy objected to the omission of any reference to the protection of Christians.
Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said a draft proposed at a meeting of EU foreign ministers expressing concern about increasing numbers of attacks on places of worship and pilgrims showed an “excess of secularism.”
“The final text didn’t include any mention of Christians, as if we were talking of something else, so I asked the text to be withdrawn, so in fact it has been withdrawn,” he told reporters.
France backed Italy on the need to include references to specific minorities, including Christians and Shiite Muslims, diplomats said.
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said the 27 EU ministers had agreed to “go back and reflect” on how, in the course of backing religious freedoms and tolerance, the bloc could “make sure we recognize individual communities of whatever religion who find themselves being harassed or worse.”
Several EU states called for the discussion of persecution of Christians after a suicide bombing at a Coptic Christian church in northern Egypt on Dec. 31 in which 23 people were killed.
Two people were killed and at least 16 wounded in a series of bomb attacks on the homes of Christians in Baghdad on Dec. 30.
During the Christmas festival, six people were killed in attacks on two churches in northeastern Nigeria and six were wounded by a bomb in a church on the island of Jolo in the Philippines.
The Vatican fears attacks, combined with severe restrictions on Christians in countries such as Saudi Arabia, are contributing to a Christian exodus from the Middle East.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
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