Supreme Court bans Jehovah’s Witnesses sect

MOSCOW — Russia’s Supreme Court on Thursday declared Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian denomination that rejects violence, an extremist organization, banning the group from operating on Russian territory and putting its more than 170,000 Russian worshipers in the same category as Islamic State militants.

The ruling confirmed an order last month by the Justice Ministry that the denomination be “liquidated,” essentially eliminated or disbanded.

Viktor Zhenkov, a lawyer for the Christian group, said Jehovah’s Witnesses will appeal the ruling, which he said had focused on the activities of the organization’s administrative center outside St. Petersburg, but had also branded all of its nearly 400 regional branches as extremist.

“We consider this decision an act of political repression that is impermissible in contemporary Russia,” Zhenkov said. “We will, of course, appeal.” An initial appeal will be made to the Supreme Court’s appellate division, said Zhenkov, and if that fails, Jehovah’s Witnesses will take its case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.

Hard-line followers of Russia’s dominant faith, the Orthodox Church, have lobbied for years to have Jehovah’s Witnesses outlawed or at least curbed as a heretical sect, but the main impetus for the current campaign to crush the group seems to have come from the country’s security apparatus.

Summing up the Justice Ministry’s case against the denomination, the ministry’s representative, Svetlana Borisova, told the Supreme Court on Thursday that Jehovah’s Witnesses had shown “signs of extremist activity that represent a threat to the rights of citizens, social order and the security of society.”

During six days of hearings, lawyers and witnesses for the religious group repeatedly dismissed the extremist allegation as absurd, arguing that reading the Bible and promoting its nonviolent message could in no way be construed as extremist.

Jehovah’s Witnesses has faced growing hostility from the state since President Vladimir Putin of Russia began his third term in 2012 and put the Orthodox Church at the center of his push to assert Russia as a great military and moral power.