Another Victim of Persecution of Disabled Believers: Court Declared Seriously Ill Pensioner Aleksandr Lubin as Extremist

On October 7, 2024, Natalya Korotneva, judge of the Shadrinskiy District Court of the Kurgan Region, sentenced 68-year-old Aleksandr Lubin, a disabled person, to a fine of 500,000 rubles. The criminal trial in this case took three years.

The prosecutor requested a suspended sentence of 7 years for the believer with a 4-year probation period. Aleksandr does not admit guilt – in his opinion, the investigation wrongfully deemed jointly worshipping God to be continuing the activity of a banned legal entity. The believer may appeal the verdict in the higher courts.

In July 2021, Nikolay Astapov, an investigator for especially important cases of the First Department of the Investigative Directorate of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for the Kurgan Region, initiated a criminal case against Aleksandr Lubin. Then, armed law enforcement officers broke into the home of the elderly disabled couple. Distressed by the search, Tatyana, Aleksandr's wife, suffered a fourth stroke — she lost the use of her legs and ability to speak. The believer was charged with organizing extremist activity and taken for interrogation to the investigative committee, and then placed in a pretrial detention center for 2 months.

When deciding to detain the believer, Yevgeniy Kolesov, judge of the Kurgan City Court, did not take into account his disability and the danger to his health and life presented by the detention conditions, although the defense had provided all the necessary medical documents. Aleksandr Lubin has a serious vascular disease, hypertension, as well as polyarthritis – a severe autoimmune disease. Due to constant pain in the hip joints, he can hardly move; as prescribed by his doctors, he must use an oxygen cylinder for 16 hours a day, which is not possible in custody.

The defense filed a complaint with the ECHR about the detention of the believer. The European Court sent an inquiry to the RF Prosecutor General's Office. The lawyers also appealed to the Commissioner for Human Rights in the Kurgan Region, Boris Shalyutin, and he initiated an urgent inspection. After that, Aleksandr Lubin was sent to the hospital for a medical examination, which established that his state of health did not allow him to be kept in custody. Eventually, after 1.5 months of detention, the court decided to release the elderly believer from the pretrial detention center under a ban on certain actions.

Addressing the court, Aleksandr expressed his view of the case as follows: "The charges brought against me are purely based on a preconceived idea about Jehovah's Witnesses. This approach toward my fellow believers was also prevalent during Nazi Germany, when thousands of Jehovah's Witnesses were thrown into prisons and concentration camps, hundreds were executed, and thousands died from inhumane treatment. Anyone who was identified as one of Jehovah's Witnesses, regardless of age, was immediately taken into custody. I do not want Jehovah's Witnesses to be treated with the same prejudice in the Kurgan Region."

Almost all Russian law enforcement agencies are engaged in the persecution of elderly believers: the FSB, the Prosecutor's Office, the Investigative Committee, the National Guard, the Federal Penitentiary Service, the OMON and the SOBR.