Primorye Court Found Liya Maltseva, One of Jehovah's Witnesses with Disability, Guilty of Extremism for Believing in God

On September 20, 2022, Aleksandr Yagubkin, a judge of the Partizan City Court of Primorye Territory, found 53-year-old Liya Maltseva guilty of participating in the activities of an extremist organization. The believer was sentenced to 2 years and 3 months of suspended imprisonment and 7 months of restriction of liberty.

The verdict has not entered into force and can be appealed. Maltseva insists on her complete innocence. In her last statement in court, she said: "It is unthinkable for me not only to commit a crime, but also to hate or even offend someone."

In July 2020, Liya Maltseva, a disabled person of group II, was surprised to find out that she was on the list of extremists of Rosfinmonitoring. As it turned out, a criminal case was initiated against her.

Currently, another trial is underway in Partizansk against believer Irina Buglak. The presiding judge is Darya Didur, who authorized the search at Liya Maltseva's house as well.

As Memorial Human Rights Center notes, the decisions of Russian courts, including the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, “contain not a single fact of violation of public order by believers, manifestations of aggression or violence on their part, evidence that their peaceful religious activities threatened the security of the Russian Federation [...] The foregoing allows us to speak about the obvious illegality of the persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses, whose ‘crime’ is that they exercised the right to freedom of religion enshrined in the Constitution of the Russian Federation.”