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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