CWN - Nearly 100 Christians have been arrested this month in Eritrea, the one-party East African state that is among the world’s most repressive, according to World Watch Monitor, which reports on the persecution of Christians.

The arrests come ten years after the regime of Isaias Afwerki, the nation’s president since 1993, imprisoned the head of the Eritrean Orthodox Church and installed a new patriarch in his place.

In 2015, Pope Francis established the Eritrean Catholic Church—the first Eastern Catholic church formally established since the early 20th century. Previously, the nation’s 160,000 Eastern Catholics had belonged to the Ethiopian Catholic Church.

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