In June 2020, a gas welder from Pskov, Gennady Shpakovsky, was sentenced to 6.5 years in a general penal colony. A practicing Jehovah’s Witness, Shpakovsky was convicted simply for expressing his religious beliefs. After Russia moved to criminalise its Jehovah’s Witness community through its counter-extremism laws, Shpakovsky is now the eleventh Jehovah’s Witness who has received a prison sentence in the country – and the verdict against him has turned out to be the severest penalty in Russia so far.
Open Democracy: How Russian law enforcement prosecutes Jehovah’s Witnesses
Dennis Christensen, a Danish Jehovah's Witness accused of extremism, is escorted into a courtroom to hear his verdict in the town of Oryol on Feb. 6, 2019.
