Court in Cherkessk Sentenced 37-year-old Jehovah's Witness to a Long Term in a Penal Colony

On February 20, 2025, the Cherkessk City Court sentenced Yevgeniy Semenov to 6 years and 3 months in a penal colony. Judge Azamat Kubov deemed peaceful conversations with people about God to be organizing the activity of an extremist organization, participating in and involving others in it.

Addressing the court, Yevgeniy said that Bible principles actually helped him in his youth to change his life style and, after serving a term, become an honest and decent person. But in August 2023, he found himself behind bars again, this time for his faith. Then the Investigative Committee initiated a criminal case against Semenov under an article for extremism. In May 2024, the trial began. Soon all the believer's accounts were blocked.

The case was based on covert recordings of conversations between Semenov and two women who pretended to be interested in the Bible. In court the lawyer pointed out that, in the case "there is not a single fact or evidence of illegal activity but instead a mass of evidence of my client practicing his personal religious activity." "Thus, the prosecution equates religious actions with extremist actions, which the law of the Russian Federation does not allow," the lawyer believes. At the same time, none of the witnesses, interrogated in the case, said that they heard any calls for extremism from Semenov.

This is already the sixth guilty verdict in the region. The cases of five more Jehovah's Witnesses in the Karachayevo-Circassian Republic are awaiting court decisions.