In Nizhny Novgorod, Gevorg Gevorkyan Was Given a Six-Year Suspended Sentence for Reading the Bible

On January 17, 2022, Maksim Sirotkin, a judge of the Avtozavodsky District Court of Nizhny Novgorod, found Gevorg Gevorkyan, 51, guilty of organizing the activity of a banned religious association. The court sentenced him to a six-year suspended sentence for practising his faith.

The verdict has not entered into force and can be appealed. The believer insists on his complete innocence: "My views are absolutely opposite to what I am accused of, and fully confirm that religious strife and hatred of people professing other religions are alien to me." There is not a single victim in the case, but the prosecutor asked the court to sentence Gevorkyan to 8 years in a penal colony.

In the summer of 2019, the security forces searched the believer’s apartment, and the next day he was detained at his workplace and taken for many hours of interrogation. According to Gevorkyan, a listening device was installed in his apartment. Gevorg was named as a witness in the case of Malyanov and others. After 2.5 years, the investigator of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Nizhny Novgorod Region, Marina Korzunova, made his criminal case into a separate proceeding. In December 2021, it went to court, but was returned to the prosecutor's office due to significant violations. After 7 months, another judge began to consider the case. For more than a year, Gevorg was under a recognizance agreement.

Giving evidence in court, the believer noted that, without grounds, the prosecution tried to link the Christian congregation, that is, the canonical structure, with the liquidated legal entity, which gave the activity of believers an illegal character. Since the term "congregation" is repeatedly used in the charge, Gevorg spoke about the modern congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses, which exists to "study the Bible, pray together and support each other." Gevorkyan noted: “It seems that those who wrote this [charge] deliberately tried to create a certain negative image of narrow-minded, fanatical people who reject all the joys of life and are not interested in anything other than their religion! It's absurd."

Despite the fact that Article 28 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation grants believers the right to freely practice their religion, sixteen Jehovah's Witnesses in the Nizhny Novgorod Region are already being prosecuted for their faith in God,  eight of them have already been sentenced.

In a ruling dated July 7, 2022, the European Court of Human Rights criticized the actions of the Russian authorities against believers and stated that “criminal prosecution and criminal liability for the peaceful practice of the religion of Jehovah’s Witnesses, together with others, was based on an unacceptably broad formulation and arbitrary application anti-extremism legislation” (§272).