The Supreme Court in Russia on Thursday declared Jehovah’s Witnesses, a
Christian denomination that rejects violence, an extremist organization,
banning the group from operating on Russian territory and putting its
more than 170,000 Russian worshipers in the same category as Islamic State militants.
The Court
ruling, which confirmed an order last month by the Justice Ministry
that the denomination be “liquidated” — essentially eliminated or
disbanded, had been widely expected. Russian courts rarely challenge
government decisions no matter what the evidence.
Viktor Zhenkov,
a lawyer for the Christian group, said Jehovah’s Witnesses will appeal
the ruling, which he said had focused on the activities of the
organization’s so-called administrative center, a complex of offices
outside St. Petersburg, but also branded all of its nearly 400 regional
branches as extremist.
“We consider this decision an act of
political repression that is impermissible in contemporary Russia,” Mr.
Zhenkov said in a telephone interview. “We will, of course, appeal.” An
initial appeal will be made to the Supreme Court’s appellate division,
said Mr. Zhenkov, and if that fails, Jehovah’s Witnesses will take its
case to the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, France.
Hard-line
followers of Russia’s dominant faith, the Orthodox Church, have lobbied
for years to have Jehovah’s Witnesses outlawed or at least curbed as a
heretical sect, but the main impetus for the current campaign to crush a
Christian group active in Russia for more than a century seems to have
come from the country’s increasingly assertive security apparatus.
Founded
in the United States in the 19th century, Jehovah’s Witnesses has its
worldwide headquarters in the United States and, along with all
foreign-led groups outside the control of the state, it is viewed with
deep suspicion by Russia’s post-Soviet version of the KGB, the Federal
Security Service, or F.S.B.
Summing up the Justice Ministry’s
case against the denomination, the ministry’s representative, Svetlana
Borisova, told the Supreme Court on Thursday that Jehovah’s Witnesses
had shown “signs of extremist activity that represent a threat to the
rights of citizens, social order and the security of society.”
During
six days of hearings over two weeks, lawyers and witnesses for the
religious group repeatedly dismissed the extremist allegation as absurd,
arguing that reading the Bible and promoting its nonviolent message
could in no way be construed as extremist.
Human Rights Watch, in
a statement issued in Moscow, condemned the court ruling as “a serious
breach of Russia’s obligations to respect and protect religious
freedom.” Rachel Denber, the human rights group’s deputy director for
Europe and Central Asia, said the decision delivered “a terrible blow to
freedom of religion and association in Russia.”
Jehovah’s
Witnesses shuns political activity and has no record of even peaceful —
never mind violent — hostility to the Russian authorities. But it has
faced growing hostility from the state since President Vladimir V. Putin
of Russia began his third term in 2012 and put the Orthodox Church at
the center of his push to assert Russia as a great military and moral
power.
The denomination suffered relentless persecution by the
KGB during the Soviet era and, after more than a decade of relative
peace following the collapse of Communism in 1991, it again became a
target for official harassment under a 2002 anti-extremism law that
makes it illegal for any group, other than the Orthodox Church and other
traditional religious institutions, to proclaim itself as offering a
true path to religious or political salvation
from NY Times