Dispute over extent of persecution

A leading Christian charity has reported that Christian refugees from the Middle East face harassment and persecution in Germany by their Muslim counterparts, writes Jonathan Luxmoore. In a mid-May report, the Netherlands-based Open Doors said it had interviewed 231 Christian refugees “in a variety of locations” across Germany, and found evidence of “an increase in aggression and violence” from other Muslim asylum-seekers. The report is the latest by Open Doors on Germany, which took in 1.1 million refugees from the Middle East and Africa during 2015, and granted 476,000 asylum requests. It said 75 per cent of Christians had cited “repeated persecution” including physical assaults and death threats.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine daily said claims of “systematic persecution” were “of dubious validity”, while the spokesman for Germany’s bishops’ conference, Matthias Kopp, said the Church had been unable to quantify the extent of the problem.