In our view, it seems that President Russo, Vladimir Putin, realized the madness he was doing.

It is increasingly evident that the 'true Russian justice' does not swallow the false accusations of religious extremism from which the Jehovah's Witnesses are being accused. Add to this the video evidence of the sabotage by the Russian special forces to incriminate a group that, according to official data of their direction, have been in full operation for 26 years in the country, with no record of illicit practice in the long Years.

It is no good for the image of any government or religious leader, a display as shameful as it is being done by several serious news portals, both on TV and on the WEB. Having President Putin's image exposed as an accomplice in a plot to inflict evil on a religious group, whatever it is composed of innocent people, is totally unnecessary and vexatious.

"If" there was any agreement, political or commercial, between church and state, to harm these people by now, by the way the jury sessions have been taking, have already fallen to the ground.

Again, the judge asked at today's session April 12, 2017 that representatives of the justice ministry who accuse the JWs should present the evidence that incriminates the group as extremists, but without success.

It is a shame for the magistrate class to see their own colleagues take part in an unjust scheme to decree the calamity of human beings that one day they 'swore' to defend.

It is a wish of every free citizen that these facts, involving the witnesses of Jehovah, serve as an example for all the courts of the world, and that the most excellent judge judge follow the voice of reason and truth as defender of justice and protector of the innocent.

BY SARAH BARRINGER GORDON 
1/27/2011 • AMERICAN HISTORY

Jehovah’s Witnesses were unlikely champions of religious freedom.

One of the most momentous cases on the Supreme Court docket as war raged globally in 1943 was about a single sentence said aloud by schoolchildren every day. They stood, held their right hands over their hearts or in a raised-arm salute and began, “I pledge allegiance to the flag…” To most Americans the pledge was a solemn affirmation of national unity, especially at a time when millions of U.S. troops were fighting overseas. But the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a religious sect renowned for descending en masse on small towns or city neighborhoods and calling on members of other faiths to “awake” and escape the snare of the devil and his minions, felt otherwise. They insisted that pledging allegiance to the flag was a form of idolatry akin to the worship of graven images prohibited by the Bible. In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, Walter Barnett (whose surname was misspelled by a court clerk) argued that the constitutional rights of his daughters Marie, 8, and Gathie, 9, were violated when they were expelled from Slip Hill Grade School near Charleston, W.Va., for refusing to recite the pledge.

In a landmark decision written by Justice Robert Jackson and announced on Flag Day, June 14, the Supreme Court sided with the Witnesses. “To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds,” Jackson said. “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

Jehovah’s Witnesses were unlikely champions of religious freedom. The sect’s leaders denounced all other religions and all secular governments as tools of the devil, and preached the imminence of the Apocalypse, during which no one except Jehovah’s Witnesses would be spared. But their persistence in fighting in the courts for their beliefs had a dramatic impact on constitutional law. Barnette is just one of several major Supreme Court decisions involving freedom of religion, speech, assembly and conscience that arose from clashes between Jehovah’s Witnesses and government authorities. The Witnesses insisted that God’s law demanded they refrain from all pledges of allegiance to earthly governments. They tested the nation’s tolerance of controversial beliefs and led to an increasing recognition that a willingness to embrace religious diversity is what distinguishes America from tyrannical regimes.

The Witness sect was founded in the 1870s, and caused a stir when the founder, Charles Taze Russell, a haberdasher in Pittsburgh, predicted the world would come to an end in 1914. Russell died in 1916; he was succeeded by his lawyer Joseph Franklin Rutherford, who shrewdly emphasized that the Apocalypse was near, but not so near that Witnesses didn’t have time to convert new followers, which they were required to do lest they miss out on salvation. This “blood guilt” propelled in-your-face proselytizing by Witnesses in various communities on street corners and in door-to-door visits. Soon the sect developed a reputation for exhibiting “astonishing powers of annoyance,” as one legal commentator put it.

Rutherford ruled the Witnesses with an iron fist. He routinely encouraged public displays of contempt for “Satan’s world,” which included all other religions and all secular governments. At the time, the number of Witnesses in the U.S.—roughly 40,000—was so small that many Americans could ignore them. But in Nazi Germany, no group was too small to escape the eye of new chancellor Adolf Hitler, who banned the Witnesses after they refused to show their fealty to him with the mandatory “Heil Hitler” raised-arm salute. (Many Witnesses would later perish in his death camps.) In response, Rutherford praised the German Witnesses and advised all of his followers to refuse to participate in any oaths of allegiance that violated (in his view) the Second Commandment: “Thou shall have no Gods before me.”

With conflict looming around the world in the 1930s, many states enacted flag salute requirements, especially in schools. The steadfast refusal of Witnesses to pledge, combined with their refusal to serve in the military or to support America’s war effort in any way, triggered public anger. Witnesses soon became a ubiquitous presence in courtrooms across the country.

The relationship between Witnesses and the courts was complicated, in part because of the open disdain Rutherford and his followers displayed toward all forms of government and organized religion. Rutherford instructed Witnesses not to vote, serve on juries or participate in other civic duties. He even claimed Social Security numbers were the “mark of the beast” foretold in Revelations. The Catholic Church, said Rutherford, was a “racket,” and Protestants and Jews were “great simpletons,” taken in by the Catholic hierarchy to “carry on her commercial, religious traffic and increase her revenues.” Complaints about unwelcome public proselytizing by Witnesses led to frequent run-ins with state and local authorities and hundreds of appearances in lower courts. Every day in court for Rutherford and the Witnesses’ chief attorney, Hayden Covington, was an opportunity to preach the true meaning of law to the judges and to confront the satanic government.

In late 1935, Witness Walter Gobitas’ two children—Lillian, 12, and Billy, 10—were expelled from school in Minersville, Pa., because they balked at the mandatory recital of the Pledge of Allegiance, and a long court battle ensued. When Gobitis v. Minersville School District (as with Barnette, a court clerk misspelled the family surname) made its way to the Supreme Court in the spring of 1940, Rutherford and Covington framed their argument in religious terms, claiming that any statute contrary to God’s law as given to Moses must be void. The Court rejected the Witnesses’ claim, holding that the secular interests of the school district in fostering patriotism were paramount. In the majority opinion, written during the same month that France fell to the Nazis, Felix Frankfurter wrote: “National unity is the basis of national security.” The plaintiffs, said Frankfurter, were free to “fight out the wise use of legislative authority in the forum of public opinion and before legislative assemblies.”

In a strongly worded dissent, Justice Harlan Stone argued that “constitutional guarantees or personal liberty are not always absolutes…but it is a long step, and one which I am unwilling to take, that government may, as a supposed educational measure…compel public affirmations which violate their public conscience.” Further, said Stone, the prospect of help for this “small and helpless minority” by the political process was so remote that Frankfurter had effectively “surrendered…the liberty of small minorities to the popular will.”

Public reaction to Gobitis bordered on hysteria, colored by the hotly debated prospect of American participation in the war in Europe. Some vigilantes interpreted the Supreme Court’s decision as a signal that Jehovah’s Witnesses were traitors who might be linked to a network of Nazi spies and saboteurs. In Imperial, a town outside Pittsburgh, a mob descended on a small group of Witnesses and pummeled them mercilessly. One Witness was beaten unconscious, and those who fled were cornered by ax- and knife-wielding men riding the town’s fire truck as someone yelled, “Get the ropes! Bring the flag!” In Kennebunk, Maine, the Witnesses’ gathering place, Kingdom Hall, was ransacked and torched, and days of rioting ensued. In Litchfield, Ill., an angry crowd spread an American flag on the hood of a car and watched while a man repeatedly smashed the head of a Witness upon it. In Rockville, Md., Witnesses were assaulted across the street from the police station, while officers stood and watched. By the end of the year, the American Civil Liberties Union estimated that 1,500 Witnesses had been assaulted in 335 separate attacks.

The reversal of Gobitis in Barnette just three years later was remarkably swift considering the typical pace of deliberations in the Supreme Court. In the wake of all the violence against Witnesses, three Supreme Court justices—William O. Douglas, Frank Murphy and Hugo Black—publicly signaled in a separate case that they thought Gobitis had been “wrongly decided.” When Barnette reached the Supreme Court in 1943, Harlan Stone, the lone dissenter in Gobitis, had risen to chief justice. The facts of the two cases mirrored each other, but the outcome differed dramatically. Most important, in ruling that Witness children could not be forced to recite the pledge, the new majority rejected the notion that legislatures, rather than the courts, were the proper place to address questions involving religious liberty. The “very purpose” of the Bill of Rights, wrote Justice Robert Jackson, was to protect some issues from the majority rule of politics. “One’s right to life, liberty and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, may not be submitted to vote….Fundamental rights depend on the outcome of no elections.” Jackson’s opinion was laced with condemnation of enforced patriotism and oblique hints at the slaughter taking place in Hitler’s Europe. “Those who begin in coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters,” Jackson wrote. “Compulsory unification of opinions achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.” Religious dissenters, when seen from this perspective, are like the canary in the coal mine: When they begin to suffer and die, everyone should be worried that the atmosphere has been polluted by tyranny.

Today, the Witnesses still proselytize, but their right to do so is well established thanks to their long legal campaign. Over time they became less confrontational and blended into the fabric of American life.

In the wake of the Barnette decision, the flag and the Pledge of Allegiance continued to occupy a key (yet ambiguous) place in American politics and law. The original pledge was a secular oath, with no reference to any power greater than the United States of America. The phrase “under God” was added by an act of Congress and signed into law by President Dwight Eisenhower on Flag Day, June 14, 1954. Eisenhower, who had grown up in a Jehovah’s Witness household but later became a Presbyterian, alluded to the growing threat posed by Communists in the Soviet Union and China when he signed the bill: “In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resources in peace and war.”

Eisenhower’s political instincts for the ways that religion functioned in American life were finely honed: Support for the amendment to the Pledge of Allegiance was strong, including an overwhelming majority of Catholics and Protestants as well as a majority of Jews. According to a Gallup survey, the only group that truly opposed the change was the smattering of atheists. In a country locked in battle with godless communism, a spiritual weapon such as an amended pledge that was not denominationally specific made sense. Only after the intervening half-century and more does the “Judeo-Christian” God invoked in the pledge seem less than broadly inclusive.

Sarah Barringer Gordon is the author of The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America.

Though recent developments in Syria are bound to dominate US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s first official visit to Moscow this week, he must also use the opportunity to highlight the dire human rights situation inside Russia, Amnesty International said today.

Secretary Tillerson is due to meet his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on 11-12 April.

“Both the USA and Russia must accept their share of the blame for the international community’s failure to broker an end to the bloodbath in Syria, and in particular we urge both governments to use this week’s meeting to work towards an end to the longstanding paralysis of the UN Security Council,” said Sergei Nikitin, Director of Amnesty International’s Moscow office.

“However, during his visit Secretary Tillerson must also raise the issue of Russia’s wide-ranging denial of human rights at home. The Russian authorities are responsible for a staggering list of human rights violations, from the de facto ban on Jehovah’s Witnesses and the incarceration of peaceful protesters to the failure to effectively investigate the campaign of abduction, torture and killing of gay men in Chechnya.”

“Any failure by Secretary Tillerson to raise Russia’s deplorable human rights record at home at this week’s meeting will send a dangerous message that violations can be tolerated for the sake of political expediency,” said T.Kumar, Amnesty International USA’s International Advocacy Director.

Any failure by Secretary Tillerson to raise Russia’s deplorable human rights record at home at this week’s meeting will send a dangerous message that violations can be tolerated for the sake of political expediency

In the first few months of 2017, Russia has seen a disturbing new surge in political repression resulting from a raft of laws passed last year which further limit the rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly.

More than 1,000 peaceful demonstrators were arrested in Moscow alone and hundreds were arrested in other cities on 26 March, following one of the largest protests held in Russia in recent years. Many protesters were fined by the courts or sentenced to several days of administrative detention. At least 14 journalists were arbitrarily detained during the rallies. 

Police also raided the offices of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, a civil society group, on the same day, and 12 staff members were later put behind bars by a court on spurious charges.

At the end of March, dozens of protesters were jailed or fined by courts following a nationwide strike by Russian truck drivers.

According to credible sources, more than 100 gay men in Chechnya have been rounded up, detained, tortured and even murdered in an apparently coordinated campaign. These alarming abductions and killings follow a similar pattern to enforced disappearances which have been documented in hundreds of cases over the years in Chechnya and other republics in Russia’s North Caucasus. Virtually none of these have been effectively investigated.

Many NGOs throughout Russia which have been labelled as “foreign agents” have faced harassment, and Valentina Cherevatenko, the founder and Chair of the Women of the Don Union, became the first person to be criminally prosecuted for violation of the “foreign agents law”.

Following changes to the law last year, banning any form of missionary activity outside of specially designated places, the Ministry of Justice has requested that the national headquarters of the Jehovah's Witnesses, as well as all 395 of their regional organizations, should be declared an “extremist organization” and shut down.

Secretary Tillerson has already proved reluctant to acknowledge human rights violations by the Russian authorities during his Senate confirmation hearing

“Secretary Tillerson has already proved reluctant to acknowledge human rights violations by the Russian authorities during his Senate confirmation hearing,” said Sergei Nikitin.

“While it is absolutely vital that he uses this meeting with his Russian counterpart to take steps to end the suffering of the Syrian people, geopolitical issues cannot be allowed to obscure the reality of the dire situation of human rights inside Russia,” said T. Kumar.