RUSSIA RELIGION NEWS


Russia blacklists over 200 Jehovah's Witnesses, imposing severe financial consequences

RUSSIAN AUTHORITIES ENTER MORE THAN 200 JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES INTO REGISTRY OF EXTREMISTS AND TERRORISTS

Informatsionnoe Soprotivlenie, 7 February 2020

 

Russian authorities have added more than 200 Jehovah's Witnesses into the registry of extremists and terrorists.

 

ABC News reported this, citing a statement of the organization on Friday.

 

The latest step in pressure on the religious group actually cuts off believers from the country's financial system, since being in the list leads to freezing of bank accounts and severe restrictions on any financial transactions.

 

Russia officially banned the Jehovah's Witnesses in 2017 and declared the group to be an extremist organization. The Kremlin has actively used vague laws about extremism in order to crack down on activists of the opposition and on religious minorities.

 

Since that time, hundreds of members have been subjected to searches, arrests, and legal prosecution. Twenty-four members of the organization have been convicted, nine of whom were sentenced to prison, and more than 300 persons are under investigation at the present time.

 

Jehovah's Witnesses maintain that the majority of believers on the black list still have not been convicted, but are under investigation.

 

Jarrod Lopes, a representative of the world headquarters of Jehovah's Witnesses in the United States, stated on Friday that Russian authorities "convict Jehovah's Witnesses and deprive them of the possibility of taking care of their basic needs."

 

"Clearly, Russia has effectively reinstated its darkest period of history by relentlessly persecuting Jehovah’s Witnesses, as did its intolerant Soviet predecessors," Lopes said

 

The registry, accessible on the website of Rosfinmonitoring [Financial Monitoring Service of Russia], the Russian agency of financial intelligence, at the present time contains more than 9,500 names. It does not say anything about the affiliation of a person with an organization.

 

Bureaucrats of Rosfinmonitoring neither confirm nor deny the black list of Jehovah's Witnesses, stating that they add people to the registry on the basis of information that is given them by law enforcement agencies.

 

Prosecution of members of the group is continuing, despite the promise of Russian President Vladimir Putin to sort out "this complete nonsense." "Jehovah's Witnesses also are Christians and therefore I do not quite understand why they are prosecuted," Putin said at a meeting with the presidential Council on Human Rights in 2018.

 

We recall that the IS group reported that earlier Russian police reported about the capture of "dangerous extremists," a 60-year-old and a 43-year-old Jehovah's Witness. (tr. by PDS, posted 7 February 2020)

 


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