In Krasnoyarsk, a father of two young children was sentenced to 6 years in prison for believing in Jehovah God. Aleksandr Filatov has been in custody for over a year

On December 28, 2022, in Krasnoyarsk, Judge Sergey Gruzdev of the Oktyabrskiy District Court convicted Alexander Filatov, a 38-year-old Jehovah's Witness, and sentenced him to six years in prison. This is the exact term that was requested by the prosecutor for the defendant.

Aleksandr and his wife Yelena have two children. Shortly before the start of the criminal prosecution, the family moved from Krasnoyarsk to Novorossiysk. In July 2021, Konstantin Zhuikov, an investigator with the Investigative Committee for the Oktyabrsky District of Krasnoyarsk, initiated a criminal case against Filatov. The believer was accused of organizing the activities of an extremist organization, and his case was separated from the criminal case against Andrey Stupnikov. Filatov's home was searched, he was detained and taken 5,000 kilometers away from his new home, and he was placed in pre-trial Detention Center No. 1 in Krasnoyarsk, where he stayed for about a year and a half until the verdict was rendered. Yelena, along with their children, who at that time were two and a half years old and ten years old, was forced to return to Siberia in order to be closer to her husband.

The criminal case against Aleksandr Filatov went to court in January 2022. The charges were based on the testimonies of two secret witnesses. During the hearing, the believer repeatedly declared his innocence. “The Bible has been my handbook since childhood. I try to apply its principles in my life, including the principle ‘love your neighbor as yourself’. The concept of ‘extremism’ is foreign to me,” he explained to the court. Filatov's judgment has not entered into force and can be appealed. The believer insists that he is completely innocent.

In the Krasnoyarsk Territory, a total of 19 criminal cases have been initiated against Jehovah's Witnesses, 6 of whom have already been convicted.

In July 2022, the European Court of Human Rights issued a judgment that rendered groundless the prosecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia on charges of extremism. In particular, it noted that “In the absence of expressions that seek to incite or justify violence or hatred based on religious intolerance, any religious entity or individual believers have the right to proclaim and defend their doctrine as the true and superior one and to engage in religious disputes and criticism seeking to prove the truth of one’s own and the falsity of others’ dogmas or beliefs” (§ 153).