Moscow courts have seized a three-story house in the area of the Mikhalkovo estate and two apartments near Sretensky Boulevard from the organization of Jehovah's Witnesses, RIA Novosti reports . They will be transferred to state ownership.
The decision to seize two apartments in a house on Lukov Lane, as well as a basement and two rooms there, was made by the Meshchansky District Court of Moscow back in September 2023. In September 2024, it was approved by the Moscow City Court.
The second decision - to confiscate the house - was made in May 2024 by the Golovinsky District Court. The published text of the decision does not indicate the address of the premises, but it is in this area that the Mikhalkovo estate is located.
The Administrative Center of Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia donated this property to Jehovah's Witnesses in Austria. Both agreements were concluded on August 29, 2016, that is, approximately six months before the filing of a lawsuit with the Supreme Court for the liquidation of the “Administrative Center of Jehovah’s Witnesses” and recognition of it as an extremist organization.
By the time of the transactions, the Prosecutor General's Office had only issued a warning to the organization about the inadmissibility of carrying out extremist activities. However, the department challenged the transfer of property in court.
“The parties to the transaction acted in bad faith; they knew about the possible foreclosure of the disputed property into the state’s revenue. The alienation of property by a religious organization was not an element of ordinary business activities, but part of an ongoing plan aimed at evading the responsibility established by legislation on countering extremist activities in the form of confiscation of property,” RIA Novosti quotes the lawsuit.
Similar decisions were made in other regions. For example, in Volgograd and Tyumen, houses and land plots that they had donated to other believers were taken away from Jehovah's Witnesses.
- 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.”