The Kurgan Region Court, following a request from the ECHR, released two Jehovah’s Witnesses with disabilities from the pre-trial detention center

The Kurgan Regional Court released from the remand prison two members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses church, who have the second group of disabilities. About this on Tuesday reported Mediazona referring to a religious organization.

The decision on the criminal cases of Alexander Lubin and Anatoly Isakov was made on August 28 after the European Court of Human Rights demanded their release.

56-year-old Anatoly Isakov has a blood cancer, multiple fractures of the spine and ribs. Due to the arrest, the chemotherapy course had to be interrupted. In the pre-trial detention center, the believer did not have the opportunity to receive the necessary medicines, which caused him to experience severe pain. In addition, Isakov contracted the coronavirus in the isolation ward.

65-year-old Alexander Lubin also had several ailments – vascular disease, hypertension and autoimmune disease.

Criminal cases against Lubin and Isakov were opened in July. They are accused of organizing the activities of the extremist community. The defendants were sent to the Kurgan pre-trial detention center No. 1.

The court left the preventive measure unchanged after the appeal. Then the lawyers sent complaints to the ECHR. On August 24, the arrested believers were sent to a hospital for medical examination. The doctors confirmed that they could not be in the pre-trial detention center because of their diseases. On this basis, the court chose the suspect to prohibit certain actions.

On April 20, 2017, the Russian Supreme Court ruled on recognizing the Administrative Center of Jehovah’s Witnesses as an extremist organization. Since then, many of the religious organization’s supporters have been prosecuted and even tortured. The Human Rights Center Memorial noted that the court’s decision “did not cite a single fact of violation of public order by believers, manifestations of aggression or violence on their part, or evidence that their activities threatened the security of the Russian Federation.”

A comprehensive linguistic and religious forensic examination conducted earlier at the request of the prosecutor’s office stated that Jehovah’s Witnesses were using an “extremist” translation of the Bible. They also allegedly consider it necessary to overthrow the constitutional system of the Russian Federation, since “they believe in the depravity of the current state of affairs, the coming end of the world, the victory of Jesus over the devil who conquered the world, the accession of Jesus and the beginning of a new world order.”

Experts considered the criticism of the Catholic Church as a sign of incitement to religious hatred, in which the Jehovah’s Witnesses brochure on science, an article about Galilee, says that the Catholic Inquisition had sentenced him to life imprisonment unjustly and Pope John Paul II admitted it. And the belief of Jehovah’s Witnesses that God shed fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah, and that new disasters await the world at the end of the world, is interpreted by experts as a call for “genocide, mass repression, establishment of inequality, discrimination, committing hate crimes”, reported information and analytical center “SOVA”.

For several years of persecution, more than 400 people have been prosecuted. The oldest defendants in the extremism case were 90-year-old Rimma Vashchenko from Nevinnomyssk and 86-year-old Elena Zaishchuk from Vladivostok. Hundreds of Jehovah’s Witnesses were included in the list of extremists and terrorists of Rosfinmonitoring. Because of this, they lost the opportunity to work, receive a pension, and use bank accounts. Several people were sentenced to six years in prison.