News from Home, World and the Vatican

The fact that three out of a seven-man Federal Court bench gave dissenting judgments on the recent "Allah" case is an indication there are cogent grounds for the decision to be reviewed by another panel of the apex court, said a Christian leader from Sarawak.

Archbishop John Ha of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Kuching also said given Putrajaya's immediate statement to assure Christians that the ban was limited to the Catholic weekly, Herald, and that the 10-point solution still stood, shows that the Federal government had the power to lift the ban on the use of the word Allah in the Bahasa Malaysia section of Herald. Read more »

Bumiputera Christians have become “instant criminals” after the Federal Court ruled to uphold a lower court decision against allowing the Catholic Church the use of the word “Allah” for God, the Sarawak Ministers’ Fellowship (SMF) said.

The umbrella group representing evangelical missions in the state noted that the bulk of Bumiputera Christians were from East Malaysia where the bibles in their native tongues or in the national language contained “Allah”, but added that thousands of Sarawakian Christians worked or studied in the peninsula where their word for God was now barred to them. Read more »

The Selangor Islamic Religious Council (Mais) today insisted it will continue to seize Bibles that contained the word Allah in the state, adding that it had every right to destroy the holy books it had already seized earlier this year from the Bible Society of Malaysia (BSM).

Its chairman Datuk Mohamad Adzib Mohd Isa said operations to counter the distribution of such Bibles in Selangor will continue and warned that it will not hesitate to arrest those distributing it. Read more »

The Federal Court's dismissal of the Catholic church's appeal yesterday only serves to complicate matters over the rights of minorities in the country to freely practise their faith.

For one, the Court of Appeal's (CoA) decision last October that the Home Ministry was right to ban the word 'Allah' gives grounds to the State to dictate the way minorities should practice their faith, said constitutional lawyer Syahredzan Johan. Read more »

A Sudanese woman sentenced to death for abandoning her Islamic faith has been freed from jail, her lawyer has told the BBC. Meriam Ibrahim's death penalty was overturned by an appeal court, the official Suna news agency reported.

She is married to a Christian man and was sentenced under Sharia law to hang for apostasy in May after refusing to renounce Christianity. Her husband, Daniel Wani, said he was looking forward to seeing her. He wanted his family to leave Sudan as soon possible, Mr Wani, who is a US citizen, told the BBC Focus on Africa radio programme. Read more »

More Christian bodies have come out to criticise the Federal Court decision today to dismiss the church's leave application to appeal the "Allah" ban in Herald, with the Council of Churches Malaysia (CCM) saying it was a regressive decision.

CCM general-secretary Dr Hermen Shastri (pic) said the government should realise that it was their own citizens using Bibles in Bahasa Malaysia. "The court decision is a sad day of regress as far as constitutional guarantee for religious freedom is concerned," he told The Malaysian Insider today. Read more »

The Christian Federation of Malaysia is naturally extremely disappointed that the Federal Court has refused leave for The Roman Catholic Church to appeal against the decision of the Court of Appeal in The Herald case.

We continue to maintain that the decision of the Court of Appeal, and its reasoning in arriving at their decision, were so critically flawed in so many respects. Simple justice would have mandated an appeal, to rectify the many incorrect and inaccurate statements and observations of the Court of Appeal that led to its decision. Read more »