A St. Petersburg court banned a popular JW Library mobile application

On March 31, 2021, the Oktyabrsky District Court of St. Petersburg declared as “extremist” and banned the distribution in Russia of the religious mobile application JW Library, a library which contains biblical texts, audio and video materials. The court made this decision without even examining the application.

In October 2020, the St. Petersburg prosecutor's office demanded that the application be banned, citing the fact that earlier Russian courts had unjustifiably added some publications of Jehovah's Witnesses to the Federal List of Extremist Materials. Prior to this, the overwhelming majority of state expert institutions, including the Federal Center for Forensic Expertise under the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation, consistently and unequivocally concluded that there were no signs of extremism in such publications. The literature of Jehovah's Witnesses is freely and legally distributed in approximately 240 countries and territories.

As follows from the reports of human rights defenders and international structures, the ban on literature in Russia became possible largely due to the half-baked anti-extremist legislation, as well as the bias of individual experts and judges, which became the basis for an arbitrary interpretation of the concept of extremism. Back in 2015, the UN Human Rights Committee recommended that the Russian state “revise the Federal Law 'On Countering Extremist Activities' in order to ... establish clear and specific criteria by which certain materials can be classified as extremist. All necessary measures should be taken to prevent the arbitrary application of this law and the Federal List of Extremist Materials should be revised."

An amendment was made to the law on extremism, according to which “the Bible, Koran, Tanakh and Gandzhur, their content and quotations from them cannot be recognized as extremist materials” (Article 3.1). In spite of this, the court banned the Bible published by Jehovah's Witnesses - “Holy Scripture. New World Translation ”. The liquidation of legal organizations of Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia, the subsequent beatings, arrests and sentences are the result of the ban on literature.

According to a lawyer familiar with the circumstances of the case, the decision to ban JW Library was made with gross violations of the law: “The application was not even examined in court. This in itself is nonsense when deciding whether to recognize information material as extremist. In addition, the court, without any substantiation, rejected numerous requests to obtain evidence and send requests to state bodies. "

The decision is subject to immediate execution, but an appeal will be made.

The JW Library app was developed by Jehovah's Witnesses in 2013. The program includes content in 98 languages and supports Android and iOS. Only the Android version of the application was downloaded by over 10 million users, who collectively rated it 4.8 points out of 5.

JW Library allows to download and read the Bible in various translations, including those published by non-Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, the Synodal Translation, which are widespread in Russia, the translations of Archimandrite Macarius, Archpriest Pavsky, and others. Various Bible commentaries and reference books, Bible study aids, videos, films and cartoons for children, Christian songs and music are also available.

“Not all publications that are available for download are strictly religious,” says Yaroslav Sivulskiy of the European Association of Jehovah's Witnesses. “They cover topics such as nature, science, history, morality, health, family life, etc. Here are just a few examples. articles: "Alcohol: Soberly Assess the Consequences", "Don't Smoke Your Life", "May Your Family Be Happy", "Teenage Depression. Reasons and solutions”, “How to find a way to reconciliation”. Banning the JW Library application for the fact that someone can download something prohibited in Russia is like closing the library, assuming that there is a banned book in its archives."