Jehovah's Witness from Ulyanovsk Andrei Tabakov was deprived of Russian citizenship and expelled to Belarus after he served a suspended sentence. This was reported by the portal “Jehovah's Witnesses. Legal situation in Russia".
Tabakov was born in Minsk in 1973 - apparently, because of this, the security forces considered his Russian citizenship acquired. It is not known when exactly he became a citizen of the Russian Federation, but, according to the portal, he had already lived in the RSFSR since his school years.
In October 2020, Tabakov and five of his fellow believers were sentenced under the article on participation in the activities of an extremist organization and the organization of such activities (parts 1 and 2 of Article 282.2 of the Criminal Code). All of them received suspended sentences. Tabakov was sentenced to three years and three months probation with four years of probation, which have now ended.
The prosecutor's office requested for believers from 3 to 7 years in a colony with confiscation of savings and personal cars. The case lasted from February 24, 2019, Tabakov spent 49 days under house arrest. The basis for initiating a criminal case was “an event that included religious chants and a sermon, a joint study of an article and a closing prayer.”
- 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.”
- 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.”