Eight Christian counsellors in Nepal were on trial on 23 July, for the country’s first religious freedom case since the new Constitution was implemented on 2015.
One woman and seven men were arrested in June for distributing a pamphlet about Jesus in a Christian school while helping children through the trauma of last year’s earthquake. The group was eventually released on bail, before the trial in July.
Anything perceived as evangelising is outlawed in the new Constitution.
The counsellors were working for Teach Nepal which denies that the counsellors were trying to convert children. The police making the arrests ‘wanted our people to say yes, they have preached the gospel…which is not true’.
The freedom of Nepal’s Christians is increasingly under threat. In July the government announced to all leaders of Christian orphanages and boarding schools in Kathmandu that it would close them down should they find just one Christian booklet in their institution. They also said that praying with children or letting them attend a Bible club is prohibited.
The decision to remain secular, rather than become a Hindu state, disappointed Hindu nationalist groups. In September 2015, hours after Nepal’s Constituent Assembly rejected calls to revert to a Hindu state, two churches were bombed.
