Nine Jehovah's Witnesses in St. Petersburg were searched

On the evening of April 4, nine Jehovah's Witnesses in St. Petersburg were searched. The website “Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia” is about this.

reports Six believers aged from 40 to 68 years old were sent for questioning to the Investigative Committee, where they spent the whole night. During the searches, security forces seized books, notebooks and notepads with personal notes, hard drives, electronic devices, Bibles of various publications, and even a videotape recording a wedding.

• In 2017, the Supreme Court liquidated the “Administrative Center of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia” extremist organization and banned its activities in Russia. All organizations of Jehovah's Witnesses were included in the list of prohibited organizations, after which criminal cases began against believers. Rosfinmonitoring lists hundreds of Russian followers of Jehovah's Witnesses as extremists and terrorists. Most of the people on the list are believers between 40 and 60 years old. admitted introduced flow the - June 7, 2022, the European Court of Human Rights banning the organizations of Jehovah's Witnesses and the subsequent persecution of believers is 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.”

admitted