A court in Moscow has ordered the seizure of 123 real estate assets belonging to Jehovah’s Witnesses and transferred them to the Russian state.
Moscow’s court service made the announcement on Friday.
The properties include 63 residential and commercial buildings with a combined area of more than 11,000 square metres, as well as 60 plots of land covering a total area of 5.6 hectares. The assets are owned by the religious movement’s Swedish branch.
A Russian court had banned Jehovah’s Witnesses as an “extremist organisation” in 2017, a move that the European Court of Human Rights ruled unlawful in 2022.
Many Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia have also been jailed after being convicted of “extremist activity.”
According to Crimean human rights defenders, the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses violates Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.
