News and primary-source research on the Watchtower organization
Opinion No. 30/2026 finds the detentions arbitrary under categories I, II and V and recommends release plus compensation. Russia responded nine days after the deadline, citing the extremism designation; the panel could not accept the reply as timely. The opinion is not binding, and the Working Group made no finding of torture or unfair trial.
The Committee's 13 March 2026 ruling found unlawful arrest, religious discrimination and denial of minority rights in a 2018 Ufa case, and ordered unspecified compensation. It also dismissed several claims, refused an earlier emergency request, and has no power to enforce anything.
In sister Child Victims Act cases over Robert Warne, a ministerial servant at a Middleport, N.Y. congregation, a court denied Watchtower's bid to shield its nationwide reports of known abusers and pierced clergy privilege over his confession letter — before both suits settled in 2026. The Governing Body was dismissed from one case and kept in the other.
A complaint filed in Manhattan federal court on Nov. 12, 2025 alleges a Circuit Overseer abused Stella Cristina Gomes De Souza beginning at age 12 in Brazil, and that Watchtower routed reports internally. In May 2026 a judge paused the case pending a New York ruling on which revival law reopens the filing deadline for decades-old abuse claims. The allegations are unproven.
Germany's Federal Court of Justice quashed a Cologne ruling and remanded the dispute over the Kusserow family archive held in a Dresden military museum. Ownership remains undecided.
In Velev and Others v. Bulgaria, a unanimous ECHR Chamber found a Shumen ordinance banning "religious propaganda at residents' homes" violated Article 9. No damages were awarded, the applicants were never fined, and the ruling is not yet final.
In a unanimous but not-yet-final Chamber judgment (application no. 49687/16), the ECHR held that Italy's decades-long failure to ratify an intesa kept Jehovah's Witnesses out of the otto per mille tax-funding system. The Court awarded EUR 10,000 and EUR 8,000 in costs, dismissing a claim that had sought more than EUR 200 million.
A July 15, 2011 study article urged Jehovah's Witnesses to shun former members it described, citing 1 Timothy 6:3-4, as 'mentally diseased.' The wording drew UK press coverage, a Portsmouth police complaint that produced no charge, and an Australian tribunal filing.
In Governing Body Update #5, released on jw.org on August 22, 2025, David Splane addressed 'additional secular education' and, per ex-member transcriptions, presented it more as a personal choice than the spiritual risk decades of Watchtower literature had described.
A Governing Body Update dated December 15, 2023, and reportedly presented by Stephen Lett relaxed a decades-long grooming norm, reframing a neatly trimmed beard as a matter of personal conscience and local decision.
The three-part series, released March 2024 on RTL's streaming service, is built on testimony from 57 former members and covers abuse, shunning, and apocalyptic teaching.
The three-part series Sobrevivir al Paraiso: Mas alla de los Testigos de Jehova premiered on HBO Max on 20 February 2026, tracing former Spanish members' accounts of abuse, shunning, and legal action. Reception has so far been mixed and thinly covered by major outlets.
Jehovah's Witnesses closed on the 432,989-square-foot 'Blue Lake' facility across the lake from their New York world headquarters on June 26, 2026, for an undisclosed price.
In December 2017 a St. Petersburg court cleared the way for the state to take the Witnesses' former national headquarters — a 14-building complex owned by a U.S. entity — as fallout from the 2017 ban.
A confidential October 1, 2012 letter to U.S. bodies of elders routed child-abuse allegations through Watch Tower's Legal and Service Departments, kept the two-witness rule, and let the branch decide who counts as a "predator" — while saying nothing about reporting to secular authorities.
On February 22, 2023, the organization behind Jehovah's Witnesses announced in one sentence that Governing Body member Anthony Morris III 'no longer serves' — gave no reason — and then scrubbed his recorded talks from jw.org over the following weeks.
The confidential 274-page "Shepherd the Flock of God" — which governs the Witnesses' judicial committees, the two-witness rule, and disfellowshipping — was leaked and published, exposing the internal disciplinary system to public view.
The "Palmer Leaks" — 33 confidential documents published by the transparency site FaithLeaks — detailed how Jehovah's Witnesses elders and headquarters handled abuse allegations inside one congregation.
Geoffrey Jackson, a member of the Governing Body that runs Jehovah's Witnesses worldwide, gave sworn evidence to Australia's Royal Commission — on the group's claim to speak for God, the two-witness rule, and whether women could judge abuse cases.