How Are Jehovah’s Witnesses Persecuted? We Explain in a New Dataset

How Are Jehovah’s Witnesses Persecuted? We Explain in a New Dataset

🟧 Who are Jehovah’s Witnesses?

Jehovah’s Witnesses are the community facing the most widespread politically motivated persecution in modern Russia. Believers hold pacifist views and do not take up arms, do not take part in politics or elections. They study the Bible together and engage in preaching activity.

Nevertheless, in Russia Jehovah’s Witnesses regularly become defendants in criminal cases.

🟧 Why are Jehovah’s Witnesses persecuted, and why is it important to know about it?

Daniil Beilinson, co-founder of OVD-Info and one of the authors of the dataset, explains:

Jehovah’s Witnesses do not share many commonly accepted values. They do not celebrate birthdays, refuse blood transfusions, and do not take up arms, as committed pacifists. To many people they seem strange, and in Russia that feeling is no accident.

The state cultivated it for decades. In Soviet textbooks they were called fanatics and agents of imperialism. In the 1990s, the Russian Orthodox Church actively lobbied to restrict their rights, telling society that the Witnesses threatened the people’s “spiritual security” and “cultural identity.” In the 2000s, pro-government youth held rallies demanding that their Kingdom Halls be banned. By 2017, when the Supreme Court recognized the organization as extremist, the ground had long been prepared: society had been taught not to notice.

But that is exactly why it is so important to read their cases carefully.

Russia’s anti-extremism legislation was honed over years, largely through religious persecution. Jehovah’s Witnesses became the main testing ground: today more than 1,000 people have been prosecuted simply for practicing their faith.

🟧 How has the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses changed since the start of the war?

Before 2022, the average sentence for Jehovah’s Witnesses was 3 years; after that, it became 5.5 years. Such punishments for reading the Bible and praying together look especially cruel given that 20% of the persecuted Jehovah’s Witnesses are women, and 41% are over the age of 51.

We analyzed data on the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses. What sentences are they given, and under which articles? How many of them are in custody? And how does the situation differ from region to region? We explain all of this in a new automatically updated dataset.

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