A court in the Rostov region confirmed the verdict of six Jehovah's Witnesses

The panel of judges of the Rostov Regional Court upheld the verdict of six Jehovah's Witnesses from the city of Gukovo. A portal covering the persecution of believers in Russia writes about this.

In September 2022, the Gukovsky City Court of the Rostov Region sentenced the defendants in the case, Alexey Gorely and Oleg Shidlovsky, to six and a half years in a general regime colony; Nikita Moiseev, Alexey Dyadkin, Vladimir Popov and Evgeniy Razumov - seven years in prison.

The believers were found guilty under the article on organizing the activities of an extremist organization (Part 1 of Article 282.2 of the Criminal Code). Previously, the prosecutor requested eight years in prison for them.

The investigation believes that the defendants “convened meetings of fellow believers, prayed and sang songs to Jehovah God.” The prosecution is based on the interrogation of two classified witnesses - one of them turned out to be a former co-religionist of the defendants. In addition, according to information from Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia, before his arrest, the FSB officer “gained access to telephone conversations and video calls of believers.”

The men were detained in August 2020 after a series of searches in the homes of Jehovah's Witnesses and sent to a pre-trial detention center. Despite the state of health of the believers, the court refused to soften their preventive measure. In addition, Vladimir Popov spent several months during his imprisonment in a tuberculosis hospital with confirmed coronavirus.

• In 2017, the Supreme Court recognized the “Administrative Center of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia” as an extremist organization, liquidated it and banned its activities in Russia. All organizations of Jehovah's Witnesses were included in the list of prohibited ones, after which a stream of criminal cases against believers began. Rosfinmonitoring has added hundreds of Russian followers of Jehovah's Witnesses to the list of extremists and terrorists. Most of the people on the list are believers between 40 and 60 years old.
• On June 7, 2022, the European Court of Human Rights declared the ban on Jehovah's Witnesses organizations and the subsequent persecution of believers illegal. From the point of view of the ECHR, the decision to liquidate the organization and criminal cases against Jehovah’s Witnesses is based on an overly broad definition of “extremism”, which in Russian legislation “can be applied to absolutely peaceful forms of expression.”