Another Victim of Harassment of the Disabled: Court Recognized Seriously Ill Pensioner Aleksandr Lubin as Extremist

On October 7, 2024, Natalya Korotneva, judge of the Shadrinsk District Court of the Kurgan Region, sentenced 68-year-old Aleksandr Lubin, a disabled person of group II, 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 probationary period of 4 years. Aleksandr does not plead guilty - in his opinion, the investigation inappropriately considered joint worship of God to be a continuation of the activities of a banned legal entity. The believer may appeal the verdict in the courts of higher instances.

In July 2021, Nikolay Astapov, an investigator for particularly important cases of the First Department of the Investigative Directorate of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for the Kurgan Region, opened a criminal case against Aleksandr Lubin. At the same time, armed law enforcement officers broke into the home of elderly disabled spouses. From the stress of the search, Tatyana, Aleksandr's wife, suffered a fourth stroke — her legs and speech became inactive. The believer was charged with organizing extremist activities and taken for interrogation to the investigative committee, and then placed in a pre-trial detention center for two months.

In making the decision to detain him, Judge Yevgeniy Kolesov of the Kurgan City Court did not take into account the believer's disability and the danger of the conditions of detention to his health and life, although the defense 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, according to the prescription of doctors, he must use an oxygen cylinder for 16 hours a day, which is impossible under custody.

The defense filed a complaint with the ECHR about the detention of a believer. The European Court sent a request to the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation. 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 the man's state of health did not allow him to be kept in custody. As a result, after a month and a half of imprisonment, the court still decided to release the elderly believer from the pre-trial detention center under a ban on certain actions.

Addressing the court, Aleksandr expressed his attitude to the case as follows: "The charges brought against me are completely based on a preconceived notion of Jehovah's Witnesses. This attitude toward my fellow believers was also characteristic of the days of Nazi Germany, when thousands of Jehovah's Witnesses were thrown into prisons and concentration camps, hundreds were executed, and thousands died from inhumane treatment. Any 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 harassment of elderly believers: the FSB, the Prosecutor's Office, the Investigative Committee, the Russian Guard, the Federal Penitentiary Service, the OMON, and the SOBR.