Court of Appeal in Cheboksary Upheld the Verdict for Four Believers. Large Fines and Lengthy Suspended Sentences Given for Reading the Bible

Text updated on February 14, 2023.

On February 13, 2023, the Supreme Court of the Chuvash Republic upheld the verdict of four Jehovah's Witnesses from Alatyr, mitigating the sentence for two of them. Instead of fines of 350,000 rubles, Nina Martynova and Zoya Pavlova will pay 80,000 rubles each. The 6-year suspended sentences for Andrey Martynov and Mikhail Yermakov were left unchanged by the court.

All four have been peacefully practicing the religion of Jehovah's Witnesses since the 1990s. However, in December 2022, in violation of the constitutional right to freely choose, have and disseminate religious beliefs, the Alatyr District Court declared them guilty of extremism.

The believers commented on this in their appeal as follows: “We have not denied that we are Jehovah's Witnesses and that together with our loved ones and friends we sang songs praising God, prayed and discussed the Bible. But our goal was not to continue the activity of a liquidated legal entity, but to carry out peaceful worship of God.” They added: "The actual purpose of the verdict is to force us, under fear of criminal prosecution, to change our religion or leave the Russian Federation." The believers can appeal to the court of cassation.

Mikhail Yermakov named examples of the endurance of repressed fellow believers during the Soviet era as a source of support. “Even the investigator was sometimes surprised at my calmness and sense of humor,” the believer said.

The European Court of Human Rights held that the Russian Federation violated the right of Jehovah's Witnesses to freedom of religion: “By holding the applicants criminally liable, simply for continuing religious services, the Russian authorities imposed a disproportionate and unjustifiable burden on the exercise of their freedom of religion and association” (§ 260).