As of 1 January 2024, 127 Jehovah’s Witnesses had been in jail in Russia for practising their religion in personal houses, in line with the final replace of the database of non secular prisoners of Human Rights With out Frontiers.
Some statistics because the ban of Jehovah’s Witnesses in 2017
- Greater than 790 Jehovah’s Witnesses from 19 to 85 years have been criminally charged or have been underneath investigation for the apply of their religion; amongst them, 205 had been over 60 years outdated (greater than 25%)
- Over 2000 houses have been raided by the FSB and native police
- 521 believers have appeared on the nationwide extremist/terrorist watch listing (Rosfinmonitoring), 72 of them being included on this listing through the sole yr of 2023.
Some statistics in 2023
- 183 houses had been raided
- 43 women and men had been detained, together with 15 despatched to pretrial detention facilities
- 147 women and men had been criminally charged and sentenced
- 47 had been sentenced to jail
- 33 had been sentenced for 6 years or extra
Final sentences in 2023: from 6 1/2 to 7 ½ years in jail
On 22 December 2023, the decide of the Cheremushkinsky District Court docket respectively sentenced Aleksandr Rumyantsev, Sean Pike and Eduard Sviridov to 7.5 years, 7 years and 6.5 years for singing non secular songs and prayers.
On the finish of the summer season of 2021, a sequence of searches befell within the houses of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Moscow, because of which three of them ended up in a pre-trial detention heart. The felony case was investigated throughout 15 months. Then it was thought-about in court docket for 13 months. Because of this, by the point of the decision, that they had already spent 2 years and 4 months in a pre-trial detention heart.
All of them denied the accusation of extremism.
A report by the European Fee towards Racism and Intolerance expressed concern that “anti-extremist laws [of the Russian Federation] is getting used towards sure non secular minorities, specifically towards Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
European Court docket of Human Rights
On 31 January 2023, the European Court docket of Human Rights (ECHR) thought-about seven complaints by Jehovah’s Witnesses from Russia associated to incidents having occurred from 2010 to 2014, earlier than the ban.
In all of them, the court docket sided with the Witnesses and ordered them to pay compensation within the quantity of 345,773 euros and one other 5,000 euros as authorized prices. This was the second resolution of the ECHR within the final two years in favor of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia.
In June 2022, the ECHR declared that it was illegal for Russia to ban Jehovah’s Witnesses in 2017. The overall quantity of compensation underneath this resolution exceeds 63 million euros. To this point, the choices of the ECHR have had no affect on the apply of the Russian legislation enforcement system. The Russian authorities haven’t paid compensation to acquitted believers, and proceed to condemn them to lengthy jail phrases
