Russia warned the Jehovah's Witnesses of liquidation a year before the ban

On March 2, 2016 — more than a year before Russia outlawed Jehovah's Witnesses outright — the country's Prosecutor General's office fired a warning shot. It formally notified the Administrative Center of Jehovah's Witnesses, the religion's Russian headquarters, that it faced liquidation for alleged "extremist activity."^[1]

The warning gave the organization two months to eliminate the supposed violations or be dissolved. It held the national center responsible for the activity of the local congregations it oversaw, and pointed to the dozens of Witness publications that Russian courts had already placed on the Federal List of Extremist Materials.^[1][2] The notice was, in substance, an ultimatum.

The Witnesses appealed, arguing that the case against them rested on fabricated evidence and literature planted at their meeting halls. On October 12, 2016, the Tverskoy District Court in Moscow dismissed the appeal. According to the organization, the court declined to let it present witnesses, experts, or video recordings in its defense.^[1] The Witnesses said they would take the matter to the Moscow City Court.

The warning proved to be exactly what it looked like — a prelude. Fourteen months later, in April 2017, Russia's Supreme Court would liquidate the organization nationwide as extremist, banning it across the country and ordering its property seized. The 2016 notice was the moment the state put that outcome in writing.

The warning did not come out of nowhere. By 2016, Russian courts had already declared dozens of the Witnesses' publications extremist and, in 2015, blocked their official website — a decade-long accumulation of legal pressure that the Prosecutor General's notice now gathered into a single threat against the organization as a whole. Rights monitors read it as the state laying the groundwork, on paper, for a liquidation it had already decided upon. The Witnesses' insistence that the evidence was fabricated, and their appeals, changed nothing: the machinery the warning described ran its course.