On January 15, the Central District Court of Prokopyevsk, Kemerovo Region, sentenced 65-year-old Jehovah's Witness with disabilities Pavel Brilkov to two years and ten months of forced labor with 15% of wages withheld in favor of the state and restriction of freedom for ten months. This is reported by a website covering the persecution of believers of this denomination in Russia.
The believer was also banned from participating in public or religious organizations for a period of two years and eight months. In December, the prosecutor asked to sentence him to three years of forced labor.
The man is accused of participation in the activities of an extremist organization (Part 2 of Article 282.2 of the Criminal Code). According to investigators, Brilkov “repeatedly spoke out and explained the meaning and essence of excerpts from the Holy Scriptures (the Bible) and supplemented the answers of adherents of the religious teachings of Jehovah’s Witnesses at a religious meeting.”
In November 2021, Brilkov and Yuri Cherny were searched in the criminal case of another believer, Andrei Vlasov, they were witnesses. Vlasov was sentenced to seven years in prison in May 2022.
In March 2023, Brilkov himself became a defendant in a criminal case; in April it went to court. Testimony against the believer was given by two men recruited by the FSB, one of whom once talked with Paul about the Bible, and the second, according to his words, saw the believer at a service.
- 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.”