On the morning of February 18, 2019, unidentified law enforcement officers invaded the house of 39-year-old Yevgeny Yakku, a citizen of the city of Arkhangelsk. After the search, he was taken away in an unknown direction and did not return home. Friends were later able to find out that on February 19, 2019, in the Lomonosovskiy District Court of Arkhangelsk a trial is scheduled to impose a preventive measure on Mr. Yakku.
Law enforcement officers repeatedly misconstrue normal worship as participation in the activities of an extremist organization. As these abuses mount, they have been noted and denounced by many observers including prominent public figures in Russia, the Human Rights Council under the President of the Russian Federation, the President of the Russian Federation, as well as international organizations like European External Action Service, observers of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. In actuality, Jehovah's Witnesses have no relation to extremism and insist on their complete innocence. The Russian government has repeatedly stated that the decisions of the Russian courts to liquidate and ban the organizations of Jehovah's Witnesses “set out no assessment of the religious denomination of Jehovah’s Witnesses or limitation or prohibition to individually manifest the aforementioned denominations.”
