RUSSIAN SUPREME COURT LEAVES IN FORCE DECISION FOR LIQUIDATION OF KRASNODAR JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES
by Aleksei Afonskii
The Supreme Court of the RF on Wednesday rejected an appeal by the local religious organization of Jehovah's Witnesses of the city of Abinsk in Krasnodar territory against a decision of the Krasnodar territorial court finding the organization extremist and liquidating it, a RAPSI correspondent reports from the courtroom.
Earlier the Krasnodar territorial court granted the lawsuit of the prosecutor and found the local religious organization of Jehovah's Witnesses of the city of Abinsk of Krasnodar territory extremist and it ordered its liquidation with the transfer of the organization's property to the ownership of the state.
The occasion for the lawsuit on the part of the prosecutor's office was the repeated violation of the law by members of the organization in the course of a year from September 2012 to July 2013. In that time, two members of the Jehovah's Witnesses twice distributed among residents of the city religious books that had been ruled extremist on the territory of Russia. After the first incident, a member of the organization was held administratively responsible and the organization itself was warned that it had not prevented repeated violation of the law.
In their appeal, representatives of the Jehovah's Witnesses maintained that both persons who had committed a violation of the law in the form of distributing books considered extremist were not members of the organization at the time of the violations, as they had left it voluntarily and in a timely manner.
At the same time, according to representatives of the plaintiff, the perpetrators, despite their withdrawal from the organization, continued to be listed as members in the Uniform State Register of Legal Entities, due to the peculiarities of existing legislation. It was this circumstance, the plaintiff's said, that led to the recognition of the perpetrators as being active members of the Jehovah's Witnesses by the court and to the subsequent liquidation of the organization.
In her turn, the prosecutor called the attention of the court to the fact that information about the timely departure of the violators of the law from membership in the Jehovah's Witnesses is refuted by the minutes of meetings of the organization. (tr. by PDS, posted 6 August 2015)
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