So I went to the homepage of the Supreme Court of The Russian Federation at www.supcourt.ru. Of course typing in witness would probably not yield anything useful, so instead I typed in Иеговы, the reference to Jehova as it is used in Свидетели Иеговы, the Russian term for Jehova's Witnesses. The internal site search yielded one mention of that word in
bulletin #3 from 1997
and one mention in
bulletin #5 from 2015
. The front page itself also had no mention of a case in progress or a recent ruling on a case alluded to in these news articles.
But of course it wouldn't be me if I just trusted a Russian office's internal search engine. So I went to Google, typed in the same keyword and limited my search to the supcourt.ru domain. I am by no means an expert in matters of law, much less Russian law, so bear in mind that the commentary I provide, while modest, is even at that still that of a lay person. Here is what I found:
A verdict from December 5th, 2016
, concerning a complaint JW Russia made about a case of customs offices refusing to let through JW pamphlets being imported through Finnland (with demands that the customs release the items). The supreme court upheld the decision made by several local and appeals courts on the case, to block the import of those writings, for the brochures in question contained claims about "the natural, biological supremacy or inferiority of persons depending on their religious affiliation and other statements" that fall under what Russian law deems extremist. Another supreme court ruling that appears to be concerning this case and is dated October 20
th that year can be found
here
.
A verdict on an appeal from June 16th, 2016
filed by the local religious organization Jehova's Witnesses Of Stary Oskol. The appeal is against a ruling by the Belgorod County court to grant the administrative plaint of the Belgorod County chief prosecutor to declare the organization extremist and have it be disbanded for that reason because they had been continuing the extremist activity, namely spreading extremist materials, despite being appropriately contacted and warned to cease doing so, as is protocol in cases like these. The document I linked doesn't from the quick scanning I did reference any contents of the materials in question explicitly, except for referencing the website jw.org and - crucially - how to circumvent the block it is under in Russia. The site itself has been admitted to a list of extremist materials by the Central Regional Court of the City of Twer in a ruling from August 7
th, 2013. I picked this one as the most recent representative of a sequence of similar cases with local JW groups that I could find.
There were a couple more cases like the second one, a few cases concerning large public gatherings that normally need to be announced and registered but weren't.
Finally,
here is a verdict from December 2nd, 2014
, where the supreme court explains why it upholds the aforementioned August 7
th, 2013 ruling, prompted by an appeal by the Twer County prosecutor to replace the ruling with one that only declares the extremist materials in question so, and not the entire website.
All in all, none of these seem exactly to be up to date, and eventhough the JW have had their share of troubles with the Russian laws and prosecutions, the case and ruling alluded to in the news article seems to be found only in those news articles. I did not find anything more recent or relevant on the second page of my search results on Google and did not bother to check out the third at all. For now I am willing to find the news story to be fake but I shall surely change my mind if and when evidence in support of the news story can be uncovered...
Topic Author
