Taganrog, Russia - Beginning at 6:30 in the morning of August 25, 2011, police executed 19 simultaneous searches of the homes of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the city of Taganrog and its suburbs. This undercover operation is the latest incident in a continuing campaign of harassment targeting Jehovah’s Witnesses throughout Russia.
“These searches are traumatic for these law-abiding Christians,” states Grigory Martynov, a spokesman for Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia. He added, “It is obvious that innocent people, including elderly ones and children, are being harassed only because they are Jehovah’s Witnesses.” One of the homes searched belonged to Ivan and Anna Kumshatskiy, Jehovah’s Witnesses aged 81 and 80. When a search squad arrived in their home, Anna was unable to get out of her bed since she is confined to a wheelchair.
The raids in Taganrog appear to be based on a ruling by the Russian Federation Supreme Court on December 8, 2009. The Supreme Court ruling upheld an earlier court decision to liquidate the Local Religious Organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Taganrog. Witnesses filed an application with the European Court of Human Rights contesting the Supreme Court’s ruling. It is noteworthy that the European Court recently condemned a similar ban imposed on the Moscow Community of Jehovah’s Witnesses by the Golovinsky District Court, and stated that the ban grossly violated the rights and freedoms of the believers.
Attorney Viktor Zhenkov says: “Since the Supreme Court decision did not abolish the constitutional rights of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Taganrog to worship freely, it appears that the local authorities have decided to exert their power and influence against them in another way, by means of criminal prosecution. This is just like the criminal prosecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses under the Soviet regime.”