From Penal Colony to Prison: Court of Appeal Upheld the Decision to Toughen the Punishment for Jehovah's Witness Viktor Stashevskiy

On June 24, 2024, the Krasnodar Regional Court upheld the decision to transfer Viktor Stashevskiy from the penal colony to a prison. He became the first convicted Jehovah's Witness to serve his sentence under such conditions.

Viktor Stashevskiy is a former sailor of the Northern Fleet of Russia. In 2019, he faced prosecution because of his religion and was sentenced to 6.5 years in a penal colony. He was sent to penal colony No.9 in the Krasnodar Territory.

The administration of the penal colony, for far-fetched reasons, regularly imposed penalties on him, some of which he did not even know about. These penalties became the formality for keeping Viktor in strict conditions, where he spent a large portion of his term.

Now the believer will go to prison for 3 years to serve the rest of his sentence. Prison conditions are more stringent and allow less freedom of movement.

"A highly moral, law-abiding person is not only imprisoned for crimes he did not commit, but also suffers from toughened conditions of detention simply because he ended up in a penal colony, where the administration is biased against Jehovah's Witnesses as a group," said Yaroslav Sivulskiy, a representative of the European Association of Jehovah's Witnesses.