SIX JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES
RECEIVE PRISON
TERMS IN SARATOV
BBC Russian
Service, 20 September 2019
The Lenin district court
of Saratov
issued a sentence to six members of the religious organization
of Jehovah's
Witnesses. They received from two to three and a half years
incarceration.
Jehovah's Witnesses are being subjected to prosecution in other
regions of Russia
also, despite the words of President Vladimir Putin in their
defense.
"The court subsumed the
actions of
all six representatives of the organization on the basis of part
2 of article
282.1 of the CC RF (organizing an extremist community) and
assigned two of them
a penalty in the form of three and a half years incarceration,
one received
three years, and another three, two years incarceration," the
press
service of the court told Interfax.
All six members of the
Jehovah's
Witnesses (an organization forbidden in Russia) will serve their
punishment in a
penal colony of general regime. No other details of the case
have been
disclosed.
The sentence was issued
yesterday, 19
September, but it has become known only now. All six defendants
had been at
liberty before the court's sentence and after its announcement
they were taken
into custody.
The press secretary of
the president of
Russia, Dmitry Peskov, did not want to comment on the sentence,
saying that he
does not know about it.
Prosecution of Jehovah's Witnesses
Prosecution of Jehovah's
Witnesses began
after 2017, when the Russian Supreme Court prohibited the
activity of the
"Administrative Center of Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia," and
ordered
that the center and its regional divisions should be liquidated.
The Ministry
of Justice, which had turned to the court, discovered in the
activity of the
organization violations of the law "On combating extremist
activity."
One of the best known
cases of
prosecution of Jehovah's Witnesses was the sentence by the
Zheleznodorozhny
court of Orel, which on 6 February of this year sentenced to six
years incarceration
a Danish citizen, Dennis Christensen.
According to the
investigation,
Christensen actually was the leader of the organization of
Jehovah's Witnesses
in Orel, although formally he was not a member of it.
In February, it became
known that
Jehovah's Witnesses arrested in Surgut may have been subjected
to torture. This
was described by them themselves and by their lawyers. In Surgut
an operation
was conducted within which members of the organization were
searched and taken
for interrogation. A criminal case was opened against three of
them.
In September, the State
Department of
the U.S.A. imposed sanctions against two officers of the
investigation
department for Surgut, Vladimir Ermolaev and Stepan Tkach,
citing credible
information about their participation in torture or crude,
inhumane, or
humiliating attitude or treatment of Jehovah's Witnesses. The
State Department
maintains that investigators "induced asphyxiation," shocked,
and
beat at least seven members of the religious organization.
Putin promised to sort
it out
In December 2018, Russian
President
Vladimir Putin unexpectedly spoke out in support of Jehovah's
Witnesses,
calling prosecution of Jehovah's Witnesses "complete nonsense."
"Jehovah's Witnesses also
are
Christians, for which they are prosecuted. I also do not
understand that very
well. Therefore it is necessary simply to analyze it; it is
necessary to do
this," Putin said at a session of the Committee on Human Rights.
In February, journalists
asked his press
secretary when instructions would be prepared regarding the
results of the
council session. "There will be instructions; the issue will be
worked
out; but we still do not know in what way," Peskov answered at
the time.
"This topic is difficult, but nevertheless it remains on the
agenda."
Responding to a question
whether from
the point of view of common sense it is possible to consider
adherents of
Jehovah's Witnesses to be extremists, the Kremlin representative
said: "We
cannot use the concepts of common sense for governmental
purposes; in the first
place, we use concepts of legality or illegality." (tr. by PDS,
posted 20
September 2019)
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