{"id":6287,"date":"2022-05-24T22:09:46","date_gmt":"2022-05-24T19:09:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/?p=6287"},"modified":"2022-05-24T22:09:46","modified_gmt":"2022-05-24T19:09:46","slug":"russia-releases-jehovahs-witness-follower-from-prison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/russia-releases-jehovahs-witness-follower-from-prison\/","title":{"rendered":"Russia releases Jehovah’s Witness follower from prison"},"content":{"rendered":"

COPENHAGEN, May 24 (Reuters) – A Danish adherent of the Jehovah’s Witnesses was released from a Russian prison on Tuesday after serving five years on extremism charges as part of Moscow’s crackdown on the religious group, it said.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Dennis Christensen<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Dennis Christensen, a 49-year-old builder, was arrested at a prayer meeting in Oryol, 200 miles (320 km) south of Moscow, in 2017. It was the first of dozens of arrests of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia.<\/p>\n

He was released on Tuesday from prison in the town of Lgov in Russia’s Kursk region, about 50 miles from the Ukrainian border.<\/p>\n

Russia’s supreme court banned the Jehovah’s Witnesses as an extremist organisation in April 2017 and ordered it to disband nationwide.<\/p>\n

“Christensen’s detention was the start of an aggressive campaign of arresting and imprisoning Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia,” the group said in a statement, adding that Christensen intended to return to Denmark.<\/p>\n

The group has around 140,000 adherents in Russia, where as of May 1 authorities had raided 1,755 homes of Jehovah’s Witnesses and pressed criminal charges against 622. Ninety members remained in jail, the group said.<\/p>\n

It said it was “deeply disturbed at the escalating persecution of their fellow worshippers in Russia and Crimea”.<\/p>\n

In its original ruling, the supreme court cited what it called the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ “propaganda of exclusivity” in ruling to ban the group and dissolve its organisations.<\/p>\n

Christensen was sentenced to six years in prison in 2019, with two years deducted for time spent in pretrial detention. He ultimately served five years of his sentence.<\/p>\n

The Jehovah’s Witnesses, based in the United States, have long come under suspicion in Russia, where the Orthodox Church is championed by President Vladimir Putin.<\/p>\n

The Russian Orthodox Church has depicted the Jehovah’s Witnesses as a dangerous foreign sect, allegations the group denies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

COPENHAGEN, May 24 (Reuters) – A Danish adherent of the Jehovah’s Witnesses was released from a Russian prison on Tuesday after serving five years on extremism charges as part of Moscow’s crackdown on the religious…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6288,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-russia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6287"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6289,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6287\/revisions\/6289"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}