ICC Note:

In Sri Lanka, a law proposed in 2008 but never voted on has been used by Buddhist radicals attempted to close down churches for almost a decade. The proposed law, called the 2008 circular, says that if a church is not registered with the government it must be shut down. Often, this proposed law is invoked by radicals to intimidate rural pastors starting house churches across Sri Lanka. Unaware that the 2008 circular is not law, these pastors often give in to the radicals and shut down their church activities. Now, a petition to remove this 2008 circular has been started and could potentially save many rural and growing churches across Sri Lanka.   

05/11/2017 Sri Lanka (Mission Network News) – A persecution trend has been quietly taking place in Sri Lanka. People hostile to Christianity have been approaching churches – often in more rural areas – and saying that because of a 2008 circular, if the church is not registered, they have to shut down.

The circular in question was issued nearly a decade ago in Sri Lanka by the Ministry of Buddha Sasana and Religious Affairs. It states that churches should be required to register with the state; however, the directive has no teeth to it legally, and a church registry hasn’t even been set-up.

So what exactly is a circular? In a Western context, the word ‘circular’ sounds like it’s just a periodical or a newspaper.

Todd Nettleton with Voice of the Martyrs USA explains, “My understanding is a circular like this is kind of a proposed law and it circulates through the different departments of the government and through the different parts of the parliament, but it wasn’t actually voted on and approved to become an official law.”

However, churches don’t always know that this circular can’t force them to stop meeting because they didn’t register. And the people harassing them know how to manipulate it.

“For maybe an uneducated pastor in a rural area, you get a bunch of people [who] come in, they look official, they have a document that looks official, and you feel frightened by that. So it’s really used as an intimidation factor more than carrying the force of law and being upheld by the courts or upheld by judges there. It’s really just a tool for intimidation.”

VOM Korea is petitioning to dismantle the 2008 circular so it can’t be used to manipulate minority Christians in Sri Lanka anymore.

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