Azerbaijan: Religious Freedom Survey, 2018

Azerbaijan restricts freedom of religion and belief with interlinked freedoms of expression, association, and assembly. Forum 18’s survey analyzes violations including prisoners of conscience who were jailed and tortured for exercising freedom of religion and belief, strict state literature censorship, and regime claims of its “tolerance.” Forum 18\u27s survey analysis documents Azerbaijan\u27s violations of freedom of religion and belief, with interlinked freedoms of expression, association, and assembly. Serious violations include but are not limited to: - a complex labyrinth of “legal” restrictions to prevent the exercise of freedom of religion, belief, and other fundamental freedoms; -total state control of the Islamic community; - a ban on all exercise of freedom of religion and belief by groups of people without state permission; - raids on people exercising freedom of religion and belief without state permission; - forcible closure of places of worship, especially Sunni mosques; - a ban on praying outside mosques; - jailing prisoners of conscience for exercising human rights, including freedom of religion and belief; - torture of people who exercise freedom of religion and belief; - prosecutions and punishments of conscientious objectors to the compulsory military service; - a highly restrictive censorship regime, including pre-publication, bookshop, photocopy shop and postal censorship; - and severe denials of human rights in the Nakhichevan exclave

Crimean Anti-Religious Persecution in 2018 and 2019

In Russian-occupied Crimea in 2018, there were 23 prosecutions brought against individuals for ill-defined missionary activity, of which 19 ended with punishment, Forum 18 has found. Many of those punished were prosecuted for sharing their faith on the street or for holding worship at unapproved venues. Cases against two more were due to be heard in mid-January 2019. This represents a doubling of such cases in the Crimean peninsula since the first year such punishments for missionary activity were imposed. July 2016 to July 2017 saw 13 known cases of which eight ended in punishment

Russia: Freedom of Religion and Belief Monitoring Group Ordered Closed

A Moscow court has ordered the liquidation of one of Russia\u27s leading organizations monitoring freedom of religion or belief violations in Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea, as well as nationalism and xenophobia. On 27 April, Moscow City Court approved the Moscow\u27s Justice Department\u27s suit claiming that the Moscow-based SOVA Centre for Information and Analysis should be closed down because it held events outside Moscow

Luhansk (Donbas): Religious Freedom Survey, February 2022

Freedom of religion and belief is severely restricted in the rebel Luhansk People\u27s Republic occupying currently (February 2022) about a third of Ukraine\u27s Luhansk Region. Forum 18\u27s survey analysis documents violations including: rendering illegal all Protestant and non-Moscow Patriarchate Orthodox communities; a climate of fear about discussing human rights violations; repeated denials of permission to a Roman Catholic priest to live in the region; and increasing numbers of banned allegedly extremist books, including an edition of the Gospel of John published in 1820. All human rights including the freedom of religion and belief are severely restricted in the rebel self-declared Luhansk People\u27s Republic (LPR), which currently (February 2022) controls about a third of Ukraine\u27s Luhansk Region. Among the rebels\u27 violations documented by Forum 18 are: - a restrictive 2018 LPR Religion Law which imposed re-registration of religious communities which were already registered under Ukrainian law, as well as making illegal any religious community which did not gain rebel permission to exist. This resulted in all Protestant and non-Moscow Patriarchate Orthodox communities being denied rebel permission to exist; - punishments for meeting for worship without rebel permission; - the banning by the State Security Ministry (SSM) secret police of all Ukrainian Baptist Union communities, despite this being illegal under LPR law as no court order was apparently made; - repeated raids on places of worship and unregistered religious communities being denied access to any buildings they own; - social welfare activities carried out by unregistered religious communities being stopped; - surveillance of local religious communities, and the encouragement by LPR rebels of a climate of fear about discussing human rights violations; - cutting off gas, water, and electricity supplies to all places of worship owned by unregistered communities; - contacts with fellow believers of any faith elsewhere in Ukraine being made difficult or impossible, including repeated denials of permission to a Catholic priest resident in Luhansk since 1993 to continue to live in the region, as well as to nuns to return to a parish. This has resulted in the repeated inability of Catholics to receive Communion at Mass, a central part of the Catholic faith; - and an increasing list of banned allegedly extremist books, including an edition of the Gospel of John originally published in 1820

Nanoscale Mapping of the 3D Strain Tensor in a Germanium Quantum Well Hosting a Functional Spin Qubit Device

A strained Ge quantum well, grown on a SiGe/Si virtual substrate and hosting two electrostatically defined hole spin qubits, is nondestructively investigated by synchrotron-based scanning X-ray diffraction microscopy to determine all its Bravais lattice parameters. This allows rendering the three-dimensional spatial dependence of the six strain tensor components with a lateral resolution of approximately 50 nm. Two different spatial scales governing the strain field fluctuations in proximity of the qubits are observed at 1 μm, respectively. The short-ranged fluctuations have a typical bandwidth of 2 × 10-4 and can be quantitatively linked to the compressive stressing action of the metal electrodes defining the qubits. By finite element mechanical simulations, it is estimated that this strain fluctuation is increased up to 6 × 10-4 at cryogenic temperature. The longer-ranged fluctuations are of the 10-3 order and are associated with misfit dislocations in the plastically relaxed virtual substrate. From this, energy variations of the light and heavy-hole energy maxima of the order of several 100 μeV and 1 meV are calculated for electrodes and dislocations, respectively. These insights over material-related inhomogeneities may feed into further modeling for optimization and design of large-scale quantum processors manufactured using the mainstream Si-based microelectronics technology

"Orthodox Brothers" : Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction, National Identity, and Conflict between the Romanian and Russian Orthodox Churches in Moldavia

akzeptierte Manuskriptversio

Cryptic Variation between Species and the Basis of Hybrid Performance

Studies on natural variation in gene expression and its phenotypic effects provide fresh insights into the origins of vigour and sterility in species hybrids