(Reuters) – A Russian court has sentenced four Jehovah’s Witnesses adherents to prison terms of between three-and-a-half and seven years, the latest step in Moscow’s crackdown on an organisation it deems dangerous, the religious group said late on Monday.
Russia’s supreme court in 2017 banned the group under a law criminalising organisations designated “extremist”. Since that ruling, raids on Jehovah’s Witnesses’ homes and meeting places have become a regular occurrence.
The district court of Birobidzhan, in Russia’s Far East, on Monday found the four men guilty of violating laws that regulate extremist organisations, including by organising “an illegal religious meeting” aimed at spreading “prohibited” religious doctrines among the local population, according to a statement from the court’s press service.
Jarrod Lopes, a spokesman for Jehovah’s Witnesses, said the verdicts were “gross injustices” which he said were part of a pattern of systematic persecution that had continued for more than five years.
The U.S.-headquartered Jehovah’s Witnesses have been under pressure for years in Russia, where the dominant Orthodox Church is championed by President Vladimir Putin. Orthodox scholars have cast them as a dangerous foreign sect that erodes state institutions and traditional values, allegations they reject.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses say that over 110 of their members are currently imprisoned in Russia.
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Andrew Osborn)
