RUSSIAS' TARGETS

[bruceq]

The following op-ed appeared in The Moscow Times on July 26, 2015

How will Europe's human rights court respond to a government that treats a pacifist religious group as a dangerous extremist cell? The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) will answer that question this summer when it rules on whether Russia's prosecution of Jehovah's Witnesses under its extremism law criminalizes freedom of religion or belief.

A ruling against the Kremlin could be a landmark decision for Russia, affecting not only Jehovah's Witnesses. From Muslims to dissenting members of the Moscow Patriarchate Russian Orthodox Church (MPROC), other Russians are also caught in the wide net cast by this overly broad law.

Under the extremism law, religious material is banned throughout Russia once a higher court upholds a lower court ruling that it is "extremist." Convicted individuals face up to four years in prison. As of this June, Russia's list of banned materials reached 2,859 items, having started in 2007 with 15 items.

The ECHR is reviewing 22 cases of Russian court bans of 72 Jehovah's Witness texts, including a children's book called "My Book of Bible Stories."

Russia enacted its extremism law in 2002, just months after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States. Two of the law's provisions defined religious extremism as promoting the "exclusivity, superiority, or lack of equal worth of an individual" and "incitement of religious discord" in connection with acts or threats of violence.

How did these provisions allow Russia to target Jehovah's Witnesses or other peaceful religious minorities?

MY THOUGHT : ¹⁰  “This is what the Sovereign Lord Jehovah says: ‘In that day thoughts will come into your heart, and you will devise an evil plan. ¹¹  You will say: “I will invade the land of unprotected settlements.*+ I will come against those living in security, without disturbance, all of them living in settlements unprotected by walls, bars, or gates.” ¹²  It will be to take much spoil and plunder, to attack the devastated places that are now inhabited+and a people regathered from the nations,+ who are accumulating wealth and property,+ those who are living in the center of the earth. EZEKIEL 38.