A Moscow court has confiscated 123 real estate assets belonging to Jehovah’s Witnesses and transferred them to the Russian state, Moscow’s court service said on Friday, in the latest step of a crackdown that began with the group’s ban nine years ago.
The properties had been registered to the Swedish branch of Jehovah’s Witnesses and include 63 residential and commercial buildings with a total area of more than 11,000 square meters, as well as 60 land plots covering 5.6 hectares across the country, the court service said, according to Reuters.
Russia’s Supreme Court outlawed Jehovah’s Witnesses as an “extremist organization” in April 2017, effectively banning the faith nationwide. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2022 that the ban itself violated religious freedom guarantees and was unlawful, yet Russian authorities have continued to prosecute members and seize their property.
Many Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia have since been jailed after convictions on “extremist activity” charges. The organization says authorities have now seized 131 of its properties since the ban, with 60 more subject to confiscation, at an estimated total value of more than $57 million. JW.org has also reported that more than 600 homes of worshippers have been raided by Russian agents.
Among the seized assets is the former Russia branch complex in Solnechnoye, near St. Petersburg, owned by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, which alone was valued at about $30 million. Forty-three of the confiscated properties belonged to foreign legal entities registered in Austria, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United States, according to JW.org.
The seizures go beyond what the 2017 Supreme Court ruling authorized, the organization argues, because the decision did not give the government a legal basis for taking foreign-owned property. Jehovah’s Witnesses have filed a claim with the European Court of Human Rights over the confiscation of the former branch property.
The move is part of a broader pattern of pressure on religious minorities and independent institutions in Russia, which rights groups say has intensified since the full-scale war in Ukraine began. International criticism of Moscow’s treatment of Jehovah’s Witnesses has grown over the past decade, with dozens of worshippers serving prison terms on extremism convictions.
Sources: Reuters, Yahoo News (Reuters), JW.org