Britain should stop direct aid to Pakistan unless its government acts to protect Christians and other minorities, human rights activist Peter Tatchell has said.
He spoke out after the Pakistan government announced further restrictions on Christians’ civil liberties. Pakistan’s education minister, Mohammad Balighur Rahman, said Koranic education would be compulsory for all schoolchildren.
Mr Tatchell, a veteran activist best known as a gay rights campaigner, said: “This is the latest escalation of the country’s bias against Christians, other minority faiths and non-believers.”
He argued that the British government “should make overseas aid to Pakistan conditional on Islamabad’s protection of the human rights of Christians and other minorities.”
“If Pakistan’s rulers do not comply, the UK should switch aid from the government to NGOs that do not discriminate.”
Mr Tatchell was speaking in the wake of a report from the British Pakistani Christian Association (BPCA), which detailed the many hardships Christians face. These include frequent violence, as well as the kidnapping and forced marriage of Christian girls.
The BPCA estimates that 86 per cent of Pakistan’s Christian population work as sweepers, domestic servants, sewage workers or in bonded labour .
Mr Tatchell said the BPCA’s report “reveals shocking inequalities, disadvantages and outright oppression of Christians and other minority faiths in Pakistan, such as Hindus and Sikhs. Atheists, secularists and humanists are also persecuted.”
Wilson Chowdhry of the BPCA said the new requirement to learn verses from the Koran “is the latest of many instances where Islam is privileged and people of other faiths or no faith are disadvantaged or discriminated against”.
Mr Chowdhry echoed Mr Tatchell. “Britain and America plough money into Pakistan,” Mr Chowdhry said, noting that “£225 million of Britain’s £445 million budget given to Pakistan last year was allocated towards educational reform”.
Site of former Carthusian priory to open as a museum
The site of a former Carthusian priory in London will open as a museum in November in partnership with the Museum of London.
The Charterhouse, in Smithfield, was founded as a Carthusian house in 1371 and dissolved under Henry VIII in 1537, where it became an aristocrat’s luxury home.
Over the following centuries the site was used as housing for the poor and elderly and as the site of Charterhouse School, which has since moved to Surrey. It continues to house more than 40 Brothers – the name for the residents, who are over-60s in need of financial and social support, and who live in community. Part of the old site is now occupied by medical schools: the college of St Bartholomew’s Hospital and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry.
The site already hosts tour parties to see the chapel, cloister, library, great hall and is holding an open house on September 18. From November the site will include a museum, telling the Charterhouse’s story from the Black Death onwards, and a “learning room” for school groups.
Charterhouse Square, the site of a plague pit, will also be newly landscaped and open to the public.
Bishop consults laity on closures
The Bishop of Salford has asked parishioners for their views on how the diocese should be reorganised.
Bishop John Arnold has issued proposals that would reduce the number of parishes by almost half and said a consultation on them would be open until October 14 and that “no decisions have yet been made”. He said the proposals were based on the advice of priests. “Now I look to you, the [laity], to consider what has been suggested,” he said.
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