Legal Docket: Global fight for faith

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Monday, the 14th of July.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: And I’m Jenny Rough. Time now for Legal Docket.

Every U.S. Supreme Court term, some of the most controversial cases center on religious freedom. Protecting an individual’s right to believe, practice, and express his or her belief in God without government interference.

EICHER: Here are a few examples of government interference that the Supreme Court remedied: In 2022, a high school’s preventing a football coach from praying on the field after games. In 2023, a post office refusing to accommodate a Christian mailman’s observance of the Lord’s Day. Most recently, the state of Wisconsin’s denying a religious exemption to Catholic Charities.

ROUGH: But protecting religious freedom isn’t just a concern in America. It’s a worldwide problem. And in many places, it’s not just loss of freedom, but loss of life.

As in Africa:

NELSON: So Deborah was lynched on May 12, 2022.

Sean Nelson is an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom International. He’s talking about Deborah Yakubu, a Christian who lived in a Muslim majority area of Nigeria. That’s a country on the west side of the continent.

NELSON: She was a university student at a school in Sokoto state.

Yakubu was killed for messages she posted on WhatsApp that offended some of her classmates.

In one, she gave praise to Jesus when a student asked her how she did so well on her exam.

On another, she asked her classmates to stop calling for Muslim morning prayers on the app, because the chat was supposed to be about schoolwork.

NELSON: They gathered a mob together of at least 50 people. … They found her hiding in a closet. They pulled her out and they stoned her to death, and then lit her body on fire.

Ten days later, another Christian, Rhoda Jatau, shared a post on social media condemning the mob attack.

NELSON: Her neighborhood was ransacked. She was immediately arrested, she was put into jail for 19 months … and she was accused of blasphemy.

Meaning she’d insulted Islam. Jatau, a mother of five, became one of Nelson’s clients. He worked with lawyers on the ground in Nigeria to defend her in court. The trial took over a year, but in December of 2024, she was found not guilty. Nelson says she stayed humble throughout the ordeal.

NELSON: She was telling me that while she was in prison, she was in a women’s prison, she actually started a Bible study group with the other women who were there in the prison with her. And she’s just been a big symbol for religious freedom within Nigeria and around the world.

There has yet to be any justice for Deborah Yakubu’s murder.

EICHER: Nelson represents Christians who face persecution like this in Africa. And not only Christians, he represents people of many different religions, like Muslims or those of minority faiths, who are also being persecuted.

And whether it’s a severe act of violence or something less than that, lawyers are making an effort to stop these human-rights abuses.

ROUGH: So today, let’s head overseas to learn more about those legal efforts.

A few weeks ago, about 300 Christians, Muslims, and leaders of minority faiths gathered in Africa for an International Religious Freedom summit. The goal: To find legal solutions and other ways to help people practice faith without fear and to secure religious freedom.

EICHER: Let’s start with what genuine religious freedom is. It’s more than just the freedom to believe, or to attend church, or to pray … or even express a belief or unpopular opinion on social media.

NELSON: We’re talking about God-given fundamental freedoms that every single person on earth has. … Every person is made in the image of God.

But religious freedom has limitations. For instance, those of one faith who persecute another cannot claim an act of persecution is the exercise of freedom. You can’t hide behind religious liberty to justify committing crimes … like the religious motivations behind the violence of terrorist groups. There’s a firm line there. ADF attorney Nelson:

NELSON: It doesn’t allow you to kill and shoot and burn and maim other people. It doesn’t allow you to destroy other people’s churches. It doesn’t allow you to silence other people. And you do see that unfortunately many places within Africa and throughout the world.

One way African countries have tried to curb such abuses is by regulating religious activity … namely, the enacting of burdensome laws intended to regulate churches. Like requiring a church to obtain a certain number of signatures, or to pay money, or formally to register before opening its doors even a small home church in a rural community.

Or, to take another example, government approval of religious leaders:

NELSON: Saying pastors or imams have to be licensed by government-approved outlets.

The thinking is with more government oversight there will be fewer abuses.

But Nelson says this isn’t the way to go. Rather … the government should enforce criminal laws already in place. That’s the solution. Hold people who commit crimes accountable for committing crimes.

NELSON: There are already laws on the books … that make it illegal to commit fraud … to incite people to commit violence … to do violent harmful practices against people. Ensuring the rule of law is enforced. And that there are speedy resolutions to those kinds of issues. When people have violations committed against them, that they can go to an agency or a court that will hear them and will give them a fair shake

ROUGH: Another solution? Nelson encourages African governments to adopt a religious freedom charter. South Africa did that in 2010. Such a document can build upon the guarantees of religious freedom established in a country’s constitution. Clarify the rights and responsibilities.

Educational programs help, too.

And working to stop the spread of Sharia criminal law courts. Such courts apply Islamic law to cases and have aggressive corporal punishments. Like cutting off a person’s hands for theft.

NELSON: And the blasphemy law … which says anyone who insults the Quran or any of its prophets shall be put to death.

Finally, Nelson says too many Muslim majority communities overlook violence against those who convert to Christianity, or simply leave the Islamic faith.

Mubarak Bala is one of them.

BALA: I was born a Muslim in Northern Nigeria.

As a boy, he attended a Muslim-only school. He was forbidden from playing with a neighborhood peer who was Christian.

BALA: This is how I was brought up. A Muslim with an expectation that I dedicate my life to the religion of Islam.

But the older he got, Islam’s teachings began to bother him.

BALA: And I didn't really subscribe to the doctrine about jihad, about killings, about intolerance and other things.

EICHER: In his twenties, he was no longer a practicing Muslim.

BALA: I haven’t believed for a long time.

When he told his family he’d left Islam, his parents thought he’d gone mad and took him to a psychiatric hospital.

He was 28.

When Bala was released, he continued to use social media to speak out against Islam especially against Boko Haram, one of the deadliest jihadist groups.

ROUGH: In 2020, plain-clothes police officers showed up at Bala’s door with guns. He was jailed and pressured to return to Islam. Bala’s jailers told him if he would stop his social media posts, and convert back, he would be given a job and a Muslim wife.

But if he did not—

BALA: The jailers told me … I’ll be killed in that jail. I wasn’t protected. … So if I don’t pray, or if I open my mouth and say I’m not a believer, then I’m putting myself in trouble.

EICHER: He went through the motions to save his life. After sitting in jail for two years, his court date finally arrived. He was formally charged with insulting Islam and inciting a disturbance through online posts.

The judge initially sentenced him to 40 years. But through a series of appeals, his sentence was eventually reduced to five. He was released in 2024.

ROUGH: Today, he calls himself an atheist with a conscience.

Bala’s court battles continue. His appeal is now pending before Nigeria’s Supreme Court where he’s trying to hold his abductors accountable. If he wins—

BALA: It means a lot of people would go to jail, and I would be paid compensation … but there has never been an arrest of anyone that vowed or announced that I should be killed or I am supposed to die.

But prosecuting these types of bad actors has proved difficult.

Africa may seem like a far-off corner of the world.

DEWALT: We are as Americans often remarkably living in a bubble to think that what happens in Africa doesn’t impact us.

Danny DeWalt is the executive director of the Sudreau Global Justice Institute.

DEWALT:It impacts the globe.

The institute is another ally in securing religious freedoms in Africa. And in the decades he’s worked on these issues, DeWalt’s seen how the relationship goes both ways.

DEWALT: So crossing cultures, crossing oceans, crossing borders, upon invitation from one another and sharing our lives, sharing our shared values, and coming together … the power of friendship, in my experience, is the thing that moves the needle in the world.

Still, I wondered how difficult it might be for people of completely different faiths to be on the same page about religious freedom.

TRIMBLE: Religious freedom doesn’t mean that all truth claims are equal.

David Trimble is the president of the Religious Freedom Institute … a nonprofit that works to protect religious freedom around the globe. He also attended the conference.

TRIMBLE: So when we come together, we’re going to have differences. Religious freedom doesn’t mean that all truth claims are valid. I don’t have to validate your truth claims and you don’t have to validate mine. But what religious freedom does mean is that every man, woman, boy, and girl has the right to seek ultimate meaning and truth in God, and they’re free to do that. That’s what we’re here to defend.

[Singing] One heart. One love. Let’s get together and feel alright.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket.

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