A court in the Russian capital has confiscated 123 real estate assets which belonged to the Jehovah’s Witnesses and transferred them to the Russian state, Moscow’s court service said on Friday.
It said the property assets had previously been registered as belonging to the Swedish branch of Jehovah’s Witnesses and included 63 residential and commercial properties with a total area of over 11,000 square metres and 60 plots of land with a total area of 5.6 hectares situated across the country.
A Russian court banned Jehovah’s Witnesses as an “extremist organisation” in 2017, a move that the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2022 was itself unlawful. Many Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia have since been jailed after being convicted of “extremist activity.”