On September 19, the Krasnoyarsk Regional Court approved the sentence of 47-year-old Jehovah's Witness Ivan Shulyuk - seven years probation in the case of organizing the activities of an extremist organization (Part 1 of Article 282.2 of the Criminal Code) . This is reported by a portal covering the persecution of believers.
In his last word, addressing the court of appeal, the man said that the investigation was substituting concepts, since it “deliberately interprets legal religious activity as the activity of a prohibited legal entity.”
The trial court sentenced Shulyuk to seven years of probation in May. According to investigators, the man read prayers and sang religious songs among fellow believers, which was recognized as organizing the activities of an extremist organization.
“In the indictment against me it is written in bold letters: “there is no information about the victims, the nature and extent of the harm.” It is logical that if there is no such data, if there is no evidence, then there is no guilt. What is being done here is not a search for my non-existent crime, but deliberate discrimination and persecution of me on religious grounds,” the believer noted.
According to the portal “Jehovah's Witnesses. Legal situation in Russia,” in 1942, Shulyuk’s grandfather was shot because he belonged to this confession. In 1997, he was posthumously rehabilitated. “Having rehabilitated my relatives, the authorities confirmed that they were wrong at one time. So why repeat history? - said Shulyuk in the last word.
In June 2020, security forces came to Shulyuk’s home with a search, and the next day the court sent the believer to a pre-trial detention center. Later, the Krasnoyarsk Regional Court overturned the decision of the Nazarovo City Court and ordered him to prohibit certain actions as a preventive measure.
- 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.
- In June, the European Court of Human Rights declared the ban on Jehovah's Witnesses 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.”