Sevastopol Appeals Court Upheld Sentence for 49-Year Old Igor Shmidt, One of Jehovah's Witnesses: Six Years in a Penal Colony

On January 13, 2022, the Sevastopol City Court upheld the sentence to Igor Shmidt—6 years in prison for believing in Jehovah God. Considering the time spent in a pre-trial detention center and under house arrest, he will have to spend about five more years in the penal colony.

The persecution of Schmidt began with a series of searches of Jehovah's Witnesses in Sevastopol in October 2020. The criminal case under Part 1 of Art. 282.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (organization of the activities of an extremist organization) was initiated a few days earlier. After a long search, Schmidt was arrested and spent about six months behind bars, after which he was transferred to house arrest. After the verdict was pronounced, the believer was again taken into custody in the courtroom and placed in a pre-trial detention center, where he awaited an appeal decision.

During the proceedings in the court of first instance, it turned out that the accusation against the believer was based on the testimony of the FSB agent Korkushko. He gave deliberately false testimony, which coincided word for word with the testimony of another FSB officer, Dmitriyenko. After Korkushko's speech, Igor Schmidt commented that he was used by the FSB for "illegal and shameful persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in Sevastopol."

It is noteworthy that this man also testified in court in the case of Viktor Stashevskiy, a resident of Sevastopol, who was previously sentenced to 6.5 years in prison for his faith in Jehovah God. In Sevastopol, a case is being heard against three more Jehovah's Witnesses from this city—Vladimir Maladyka, Yevgeniy Zhukov and Vladimir Sakada. They were searched simultaneously with Igor Schmidt.

In October 2021, the judge of the Gagarinskiy District Court of the city of Sevastopol, Lyudmila Tumaykina, found businessman Igor Shmidt guilty of organizing the activities of an extremist organization and sentenced him to a real prison term. The verdict entered into force. The believer still insists on his innocence. He has the right to appeal against the verdict in cassation procedure, as well as in international instances.

The illegality of the criminal prosecution of individual believers in Russia was recently confirmed by the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, having ruled that the divine services of Jehovah's Witnesses, their joint rituals and ceremonies do not in themselves constitute a crime under Art. 282.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, despite the liquidation of their legal entities. Igor Schmidt himself stated the same at the court of first instance: "All the materials in the case prove exclusively my belonging to the religion of Jehovah's Witnesses, which has not been banned in Russia by any court."

On December 7, 2021, members of the Human Rights Council under the President of the Russian Federation HRC Valeriy Fadeyev and Andrey Babushkin asked V. V. Putin “to draw the attention of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation, Director of the Federal Security Service, Chairman of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation and the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation to the explanation of the Plenum of the Supreme Court RF on this issue and instruct them to urgently and carefully check the expediency of keeping 56 people from among the Church of Jehovah's Witnesses in custody, for whom no court sentences have yet been passed, to study the previous sentences for their cancellation. "