Forum 18 monitors religious freedom in Russia and other former parts of
the USSR. On 2004-JUN-17, they reported:
With the coming into effect yesterday of a ban on the organized activity
of some 10,000 Jehovah's Witnesses in the city of Moscow, their hopes now rest
upon the European Court of Human Rights, Forum 18 News Service has learnt.
On 16 June Moscow City Court rejected the religious organization's appeal
against a 26 March lower court decision stripping its legal status and
prohibiting its activity in the Russian capital. While the Jehovah's
Witnesses' appeal was still pending, that verdict was not in force (see
F18News 29 March http://www.forum18.org/.
Speaking to Forum 18 outside the courtroom on 16 June, Jehovah's Witnesses
lawyer John Burns said that the European Court would now consider whether
the ruling violates the European Convention on Human Rights, to which
Russia is a signatory. During the appeal hearing, Burns argued that the ban
clearly breaches the Convention's specific guarantees of religious freedom,
freedom of association and non-discrimination on religious grounds. Should
the European Court indeed find the Moscow Court in violation of the
Convention, Burns told Forum 18, Russia will be obliged to reverse the ban
on the Jehovah's Witness community or else face penalties ranging from a
minimum fine of several thousand Euros to expulsion from the Council of
Europe, "although that is not very likely."
Following a six-year trial, the ban on the Moscow Jehovah's Witness
community marks the first successful attempt to outlaw the activity of a
religious organization under Russia's 1997 law on religion. Notwithstanding
a 2001 verdict in the Jehovah's Witnesses' favor, Moscow courts have found
the community guilty of forcing families to disintegrate, infringing the
person, rights and freedoms of the citizen, encouraging suicide or the
refusal on religious grounds of medical aid to the critically ill, and
inciting citizens to refuse to fulfill their civil obligations established
by law. Under Article 14 of the 1997 law, a religious organization may lose
its legal status and have its activity banned on these grounds (see F18News
25 May http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=327 ).
For most of yesterday's four-hour hearing, the Jehovah's Witnesses' three
lawyers outlined how the lower court had failed to provide evidence of the
allegations against the community in the form required by a court of law,
i.e. previous administrative or criminal convictions of named individuals
belonging to the organization. This absence of such evidence was
reminiscent of Soviet-era trials against Jehovah's Witnesses in the view of
one lawyer, Artur Leontyev. John Burns pointed out that the only legal
conviction cited in the lower court's decision - the prosecution of a
Muscovite who physically assaulted a female Jehovah's Witness as she tried
to give him religious literature - was even used to demonstrate the
consequences of the organization's disregard for citizens' right to
privacy: "This is a licence for brutality on the basis of
bigotry." (For more on the contents of this verdict, see see F18News
25 May http://www.forum18.org/
The Jehovah's Witnesses' third lawyer, Galina Krylova, maintained that the
lower court had been entirely selective in its use of evidence,
specifically by ignoring extensive expert testimony favorable to the
Jehovah's Witnesses, such as confirmation by the Russian Ministry of Health of the existence of perfectly acceptable medical alternatives to blood
transfusions. In her view, this was because the court's decision was
"ideologically - maybe even politically -
predetermined." She added that Russian law permits citizens to refuse
both medical treatment and military service.
John Burns also pointed out to the court that the experts whose analyses
were cited in the lower court verdict had acknowledged that they had never
attended a Jehovah's Witness meeting. Comparing the Moscow religious
community to a village, he suggested that the seven non-Jehovah's Witnesses
who testified that the organization had broken up their families were like
seven relatives living outside this village while being involved in family
disputes with several of its inhabitants. "Would you liquidate the
entire village on the basis of what those seven told you, as well as the
conclusion of a few experts who had never lived there?" he asked the
three judges. "Well, that's what the lower court judge did."
Burns also cited several European Court judgments protecting Jehovah's
Witnesses' rights and recalled that Russia's Supreme Court has twice
ordered lower courts to implement European Court decisions.
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Representing the public prosecutor's office of Moscow's northern district,
Tatyana Kondratyeva responded to the Jehovah's Witnesses' lawyers by
acknowledging that "illegal methods were used to influence thought and
convictions" in the Soviet Union, but added that the repression of
Jehovah's Witnesses during that period had never been one of the
prosecution's arguments. She called upon the court to reject the
conclusions of "foreign lawyers and experts", as well as
decisions by the European Court, since these "are not even indirectly
related to the subject of this case." Dismissing as biased the expert
analyses "correctly" rejected by the lower court, Kondratyeva
insisted that the Jehovah's Witnesses' activity - rather than
doctrine - had been under scrutiny and questioned how anyone could
not see its negative consequences: "Isn't damage to physical and
psychological health negative?"
In support of Kondratyeva's arguments to uphold the ban, a representative
of Moscow City public prosecutor's office commented that the Jehovah's
Witnesses reject alternative as well as military service "as far as I
know". She also noted that Jehovah's Witnesses keep their children
away from state programs aimed at encouraging patriotism at an early age." "And why should I find literature in my letterbox which I never asked
for?" this official concluded. "Why do people come up to me on
the street? Certain citizens' rights are violated by that!"
As there is no precedent for such a ban under current Russian law, it is
not yet clear exactly how it will be enforced. Remarking that it would be
easy to close a bank account and destroy an official stamp, Galina Krylova
queried how the authorities would stop organized activity: "Will the
police check up to see whether or not Jehovah's Witnesses are celebrating
their birthdays?" Tatyana Kondratyeva maintained that there was no
legal obstacle to prevent the community from reforming as an unregistered
religious group, even though the ban states clearly that the Moscow
organization of Jehovah's Witnesses is to terminate its activity in
addition to losing its legal status. John Burns told Forum 18 that he did
not find Kondratyeva's suggestion credible in view of the nature of the
ban: "It's like saying that you can be Catholic but you can't have a
church - you can hold a belief but you can't do anything about it."
Forum 18 notes that the official commentary to Article 14 of the 1997
religion law refers to prosecution according to Article 239 of the Criminal
Code, which punishes the participation in an organization found to have
violated the person and rights of the citizen with penalties ranging from
a fine of 100 times the minimum wage (14,670 Norwegian kroner, 1,743 Euros
or 2,107 US dollars) to imprisonment for up to two years.
While John Burns told Forum 18 that the Moscow Jehovah's Witness community
hosted a stadium congress attended by some 21,000 believers "without
incident" as recently 11-13 June, the 26 March lower court decision
has already had negative repercussions outside Moscow. Even when
technically not in force, it was reportedly used to justify the
cancellation of local congregations' rental contracts in several cities
(see F18News 13 April http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=297)
and cited among the grounds for dismissal of three Jehovah's Witness
employees on the Pacific island of Sakhalin (see F18News 4 May http://www.forum18.org/. It thus appears highly likely that the
ban's negative consequences for Jehovah's Witnesses will increase across
Russia following the latest Moscow court decision. 1
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