U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
URGES RUSSIA TO
CEASE CHARGING JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES WITH EXTREMISM
Interfax-Religiia,
23 September 2019
The United States is
concerned about the
sentence of a Saratov court for six members of the organization
of Jehovah's
Witnesses, which is forbidden in Russia, the head of the press
service of the
foreign policy department of the U.S.A., Morgan Ortegus,
reported.
"We are profoundly concerned by the decision of a Russian
court to
imprison six Jehovah's Witnesses for peaceful religious
practice," Ortegus
wrote on Twitter.
"We
urge Russia
to respect the rights of its citizens to freedom of religious
confession and to
cease falsely accusing Jehovah's Witnesses of extremism," she
added.
On
Friday the Lenin
district court of Saratov issued a sentence for six members of
the Jehovah's
Witnesses organization.
"The
court
characterized the actions of all six representatives of the
organization on the
basis of part 2 of article 282.1 of the Criminal Code of the RF
(organization
of an extremist association) and assigned to two of them a
punishment in the
form of three and a half years incarceration, to one, three
years, and to
another three, two years incarceration," Interfax was told at
the press
service of the court.
Meanwhile,
a member
of the Council on Human Rights under the president of the RF,
Andrei Babushkin,
advocated the introduction of changes into legislation in order
to eliminate
the possibility of prosecuting people for their religious
confession.
In
2017, the Russian
Supreme Court ruled to grant the lawsuit of the Ministry of
Justice and to find
the "Administrative Center of Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia" to
be an
extremist organization and to liquidate it and prohibit its
activity on the
territory of the RF. (tr. by PDS, posted 23 September 2019)
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