The Court of Appeal upheld the unlawful decision to ban the translation of the Bible

On December 20, 2017, at 9:55 p.m., the Leningrad Regional Court upheld the decision of the Vyborg City Court to recognize the Russian translation of the Bible distributed by Jehovah's Witnesses as "extremist material." Representatives of the copyright holder intend to appeal this decision.

Such erroneous court decisions to recognize certain printed materials as extremist are the basis of all accusations of extremism brought against Jehovah's Witnesses, as well as the basis of the court decision to liquidate and ban all registered organizations of this religion and turn their property into state revenue. The court's absurd decision to ban the Bible itself clearly demonstrated the flawed mechanisms for recognizing Witnesses' liturgical materials, including incompetent or openly biased expert opinions and law-violating court decisions. In 2014, the situation with expert examinations and lawsuits against sacred texts attracted the attention of the President of Russia, so he came up with a legislative initiative to protect the holy books of various religions, including the Bible, from the effect of anti-extremist legislation (in other words, from the incompetence of prosecutors, experts and judges). However, even this did not help to save one of the translations of the Bible from yesterday's court decision.

International organizations have repeatedly called on Russia to abandon the existing List of Extremist Materials, to review and cancel court decisions against Jehovah's Witnesses, who are currently being treated unfairly on the basis of such court decisions.