Photo: Arkadya Hakobyan
Photo: Arkadya Hakobyan
To find Arkadya Akopovich Akopyan guilty under Part 1 of Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation and sentenced to 120 hours of compulsory labor. This decision was announced on December 27, 2018 by Oleg Golovashko, a judge of the Prokhladnensky District Court. There is no real evidence of Hakobyan's guilt in the case, so the verdict will be appealed. In the past, all attempts to charge individual Jehovah's Witnesses under Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation were unsuccessful.
The court believed in an implausible accusation: five witnesses for the prosecution, who do not profess the religion of Jehovah's Witnesses, unanimously admitted that they had massively distributed Jehovah's Witnesses brochures with signs of extremism on behalf of Arkadi Hakobyan. The court considered all other episodes to be unproven or insignificant.
"Jehovah's Witnesses never instruct strangers to distribute our liturgical literature," says Yaroslav Sivulsky of the European Association of Jehovah's Witnesses. Finally, for some people who do not profess our religion to so unanimously undertake to spread the teachings of Jehovah's Witnesses is something out of the realm of fantasy. We are deeply saddened by the stigma of a criminal that the judge imposed on an honest, decent person."
It is noteworthy that in 2018, Russia took steps to decriminalize Part 1 of Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation at the legislative level. Nevertheless, the court considered itself entitled to sentence a 70-year-old pensioner who worked all his life working as a tailor to punishment in the form of compulsory labor.
Earlier, under Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, the authorities tried to accuse Jehovah's Witnesses in Gorno-Altaisk, Yoshkar-Ola, Sergiev Posad, and Chita. All the trials that came to a verdict under this article ended with the full acquittal of believers with the right to rehabilitation.
