(TIMOR-LESTE)
Union of Catholic Asian News (UCA News) [Hong Kong]
March 7, 2025
Education officials in Catholic-majority nation say student abuse will not be tolerated after two recent scandals
The top education officials in Catholic-majority Timor-Leste have warned of stern punitive action against teachers if students face sexual abuse from them in schools. Education Minister Dulce de Jesus Soares said the government will not tolerate sexual abuse committed in schools.
Soare’s press meeting last Friday at the Education Ministry office in the national capital, Dili, came after sex abuse cases were reported in two public schools involving school directors within a week. Among others present at the conference were Secretary of State for Gender Equality Elvina Sousa Carvalho and National Institute for Child Rights Protection Dinorah Granadeiro.
The government response came a day after Estefania Barreto Cardoso, the mother of an abuse victim, held a press conference saying her daughter faced sexual violence in Nicolao Lobato Public School.
In the second case, a student was allegedly offered 50 US Dollars by the school director to go to “an empty house” with him. The student’s family reported the case to the police. Both schools have not responded to the allegations.
Bishop Enrique Figaredo Alvargonzález, a Spanish Jesuit missionary and Apostolic Prefect of Battambang, a Cambodian province bordering Thailand, has urged Thai authorities in Bangkok to rethink a border wall proposal put forward as part of the Thai crackdown on criminal syndicates running human trafficking networks.
The crackdown was launched early last month, targeting scam compounds that take advantage of Thai utilities, including electricity, internet, fuel, and other services, but operate across its borders in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos.
A border wall along the more porous parts of their shared 817-kilometer border was put forward at a Thai cabinet meeting with the foreign and defense ministries on Monday.
Alvargonzález, who has been in Cambodia for the last 40 years, said the wall is “certainly not the right solution.” Thousands of impoverished Cambodians use the Battambang border region to travel into Thailand in search of legitimate work, particularly on construction sites, and many have family and personal connections on both sides of the frontier. Phnom Penh has yet to respond to the proposal.
Hundreds of Catholic nuns in Sri Lanka took to the streets on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, to call on the government and other groups to protect the rights of unwed mothers and sexual abuse victims.
The nuns from Good Shepherd congregation, wearing their religious habits, carried white boxes as they rallied on Wednesday to collect donations to support victims of rape, abuse, child marriage and unwed mothers.
Sister Rosary Perera, head of the Ave Maria Convent near St. Peter’s Church in Negombo, a Catholic stronghold near the national capital Colombo, said the rally was part of a national campaign by her religious order. Many people generously donated money to support those in need. A rape victim from Badulla city, who received support from the nuns said the nuns fill voids for abuse victims with protection and care.
Between 800 and 1,000 abortions take place in the country daily despite abortion being illegal, media reports say. The Sri Lankan Penal Code criminalizes abortion except for cases when the mother’s life is at risk.
Malaysia’s National Unity Minister Aaron Aro Dagang has condemned all forms of conduct that mock or insult any religion after a local radio station released a video of its presenters mocking a Hindu ritual dance, sparking widespread protest from citizens.
Dagang criticized the now-removed video by Malay-language radio station Era FM mocking the Thaipusam ritual dance as a contradiction to the nation’s founding principles on Tuesday.
The now-withdrawn clip, released on Era FM’s social media channels, showed one of its presenters, Azad Jazmin John Louis Jeffri — popularly called Pak Azad — mocking the way Hindu devotees enter a trance while fulfilling their vows during a Thaipusam-related ritual. The clip included two other presenters, Nabil Ahmad and Radin Amir Affendy, shouting “Vel, Vel!” and laughing hysterically at Azad’s antics, the MalayMail reported.
According to Hindu beliefs, Thaipusam commemorates the occasion when Lord Murugan received the heavenly weapon, the Vel or spear, from his mother, Goddess Parvati. The trio, who are presenters of a morning show, 3 Pagi Era, issued an apology.
Catholics in South Korea have urged the Japanese government to offer a sincere apology to the comfort women forced into sexual slavery by its imperial army during World War II.
The National Catholic Action for the Annulment and Justice of the Japanese Comfort Women Agreement organized a Holy Mass and rally supporting the cause of comfort women in the national capital, Seoul, on March 1.
Father Justino Ha Sung-yong, chair of the Seoul Archdiocesan Justice and Peace Committee, pointed out that the issue was not political or diplomatic but a matter of “universal human rights and human decency.”
Priests and laity from nine Catholic dioceses in South Korea attended a rally that followed the Holy Mass near the Statue of Peace in Junghak-dong, located opposite the Japanese embassy. The statue, installed in 2011, depicts a girl dressed in a chima jeogori, a modified form of hanbok from the late 19th to early 20th century, with small hands and short hair, sitting and staring at the embassy of Japan in central Seoul.
Global rights group Amnesty International has criticized the recent flogging of two Indonesian men for having a consensual same-sex relationship as a “horrifying act of discrimination.” “Intimate sexual relations between consenting adults should never be criminalized,” the group’s deputy regional director Montse Ferrer said in a statement.
The condemnation came after two university students aged 24 and 18 years old were flogged in public on February 27 in the city of Banda Aceh for allegedly conducting a same-sex relationship.
Banda Aceh is the largest city and capital of Aceh province, the only Indonesian province that has enforced Sharia law for both Muslims and non-Muslims. It also criminalizes same-sex relationships.
One of the men accused of instigating the relationship was lashed 82 times, and the second man 77 times. Both were caned with a rattan stick as dozens watched on. The men’s sentences were reduced by three lashes for the three months spent in detention.
Conservative Aceh province prefers public canning as a common punishment for a wide range of offences that include gambling, drinking alcohol, and adultery.
Bishop John Nellikunnel of Idukki Catholic diocese in southern Indian Kerala state has accused its communists-led government of inaction after 12 people, including Christians, were killed in wild animal attacks in the past two months.
“The Kerala state government is not doing enough to restrict wild animals in the forest,” the Bishop remarked. He also joined a protest march convened by the All-Kerala Catholic Congress, a laity organization of the Syro-Malabar Church, in the Idukki district on Tuesday.
Some 22 percent of this northern district’s estimated one million people are Christians, mostly members of the Eastern rite Church based in Kerala.
The farmers want the government to protect their lives and livelihoods from rising attacks by wild animals, particularly elephants, which enter human habitats seeking water and food as forest resources dry up in the four-month-long summer starting in February. The farmers blame stringent laws like the Wildlife Protection Act 1972 for their current plight.
Filipino Church and advocacy groups have urged the nation’s top court to not allow commercial fishing within 15 kilometers of the shoreline, reserved as municipal fishing grounds for small-scale fishers.
Some 2.3 million small-scale fishermen in the Catholic-majority country are affected by a December 2024 ruling of the Supreme Court’s First Division upholding a Malabon trial court’s decision to declare the preferential access to small, municipal fishers as “unconstitutional.”
Lawyer Aaron Pedrosa, secretary-general of Sanlakas, a progressive coalition of marginalized sectors, said they, along with other groups, have filed a petition for intervention in the case and await a decision. Last year’s court rulings, if implemented, will push fisher-people “to further misery,” the activist lawyer said.
The trial court’s decision came on a petition filed by a commercial fishing company, challenging the restrictions on municipal waters. The Department of Agriculture- Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resource filed a petition in January to reconsider the ruling.