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.
Russia Bans Jehovah’s Witnesses, Calling It an Extremist Group -
By ANDREW HIGGINSAPRIL 20, 2017
MOSCOW — Russia’s Supreme Court 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.
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.
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.