Nigeria tillåter sexuella övergrepp på flickor och kvinnor! Vilket skitland! Åk inte dit!

A few hours later, her family start to worry. By the evening, there is still no sign of her.

As her family anxiously searches for her, the girl is sexually abused, pressured to leave her Christian faith and forced into marriage with her captor. If she doesn’t comply, she’s beaten.

Shockingly, this is a reality for many women and girls across Nigeria, who are being targeted and abducted by armed militant groups.

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This month, UN experts, based on information received from ADF International and other human rights groups, issued a formal communication to the Nigerian government.

The letter addresses the well-documented pattern of religiously-motivated violence targeting Christian communities – particularly women and girls – in the country’s Northern and Central regions.

The communication highlights cases in which women and girls had been abducted, subjected to sexual violence, forced conversion and child marriage, or were attacked for rejecting a forced marriage arrangement. It also calls out Sharia-based laws criminalising blasphemy and other so-called “offences against religion”, which fuel a climate of worsening insecurity and hostility.

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A letter alone cannot end violence, but it's a vital step towards lasting change.

For the UN to raise the persecution of Christians in Nigeria as an issue of international concern is a major step forward. But recognition alone is not justice.

Justice means Nigerian authorities are held accountable for their failure to provide adequate protection to vulnerable citizens from terrorist and other armed or militant groups. It also means discriminatory laws, including the blasphemy codes and other Sharia-based laws that fuel hostility and violence against Christians and other belief minorities are repealed without delay.

It means the women and girls who have suffered know that the world did not simply move on.

We are not moving on until religious freedom becomes a reality for everyone, in Nigeria and everywhere.

Will you make a gift today to keep that fight going?

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Every contribution funds legal work, advocates on the ground, and the systems we build to ensure cases like this don't fall through the cracks again."

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