Judge revives Watch Tower's suit over Russia's seizure of the Witnesses' St Petersburg headquarters

A federal judge in Washington has revived Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania's lawsuit against the Russian Federation over the 2017 seizure of the Jehovah's Witnesses' national headquarters in St Petersburg.

In a memorandum opinion dated 23 July 2026, Judge Rudolph Contreras vacated — undid — his own earlier order throwing the case out, and gave Watch Tower 180 days from the order issued alongside that opinion to deliver the lawsuit papers to the defendants through diplomatic channels, meaning by way of the U.S. State Department rather than the post.^[1]

Nothing in the ruling touches the substance of the dispute. The case had been dismissed in September 2025 for a reason that had nothing to do with whether Russia wrongly took the property: Watch Tower had never validly delivered the lawsuit papers to the defendants, and a court cannot exercise power over a defendant that has not been properly served.^[2] What the judge decided on 23 July was that Watch Tower should get another chance to do that delivery correctly, rather than have its case ended over the failure.

At issue is a building complex that served as the national headquarters for more than 175,000 Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia, according to the complaint, and which documents filed with that complaint valued at more than $30 million.^[2] Watch Tower argues it has run out of alternatives, telling the court that its efforts in the Russian courts and at the European Court of Human Rights failed to provide meaningful relief.^[1] The Russian courts did rule against it. The European Court ruled against Russia — but awarded the money to a different organisation, one Russia had already dissolved.^[2]

What the judge granted, and what he refused

Watch Tower had asked the court to do two distinct things, and got one of them.

It first argued that its delivery of the papers to the V.A. Almazov National Medical Research Centre — the state medical institute that now occupies the former headquarters — had actually been good enough, even if imperfect. A courier had hand-delivered the documents to Almazov's director general,^[2] so the institute plainly knew about the lawsuit; the law governing service on state-owned bodies, Watch Tower said, should be read to forgive technical slips.^[1]

Judge Contreras refused. The problem, he wrote, was not that the delivery was sloppy but that the method was off-limits in the first place. Forgiveness for near-misses "presupposes a legally authorized method of service at the outset," and where the method is "categorically impermissible," there is nothing to forgive.^[1] Watch Tower had also pointed to a Florida federal case that allowed mail service on a country in similar circumstances; the judge noted that it was decided in 2021, before this lawsuit began, and that a motion asking a judge to revisit his own ruling — a motion for reconsideration — cannot be used to raise arguments that could have been made the first time.^[1]

On the second request he agreed. Courts asked to give a plaintiff more time to deliver papers normally look for "good cause" — some outside obstacle, rather than the plaintiff's own error. Watch Tower had no such excuse, the judge found: it had simply misread the law, believing mail service into Russia was allowed.^[1] But a judge may still extend the deadline without good cause, and here the circumstances warranted it. The defendants already had actual notice of the lawsuit and would suffer little if any disadvantage; there was "a reasonable prospect that service can be obtained" through diplomatic channels; and letting the case proceed served "the interests of justice and judicial economy."^[1]

Why an ordinary delivery problem became fatal

Foreign governments generally cannot be sued in United States courts at all. The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act sets out the narrow exceptions — and Watch Tower sued under it, arguing that the taking of the Bethel Facility was an expropriation, a government seizure of private property, carried out in violation of international law.^[2]

That statute also dictates, in strict terms, how a foreign state must be handed the papers. One of its methods is any form of mail requiring a signed receipt, dispatched by the court clerk to the country's foreign minister.^[2] Watch Tower tried that route, and ran into two walls.

The first was a treaty. Russia is party to the Hague Service Convention, the agreement governing how legal papers cross borders, but when it joined it formally objected to the article permitting service by post: "Service of documents by methods listed in Article 10 of the Convention is not permitted in the Russian Federation."^[2] Because of that objection, the September 2025 opinion held, mail service into Russia is not merely risky but categorically unavailable — a conclusion the judge supported with a line of federal decisions reaching the same result, and which extends to international couriers.^[2]

The second was the war. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, major U.S. carriers largely stopped delivering there, and DHL refused to carry the packets into Russia.^[2] What followed reads like a logistics puzzle. Watch Tower had the court clerk send the documents by DHL to Turkey, where a courier service was to carry them the rest of the way. The courier made several attempts at personal delivery; the person representing Russia's foreign minister refused to accept them. The courier then handed the parcels to Russian Post, which did deliver them — but obtained no signature, apparently confirming receipt by QR code instead.^[2]

The statute required mail with a signed receipt, addressed to the foreign minister. These packets had neither: they were addressed to a courier company in Turkey, and no signature came back.^[2] Nor could Russia's actual knowledge of the lawsuit make up for those formalities under this mail method — the judge cited appeals-court decisions holding that, for it, neither near-compliance nor actual notice counts as valid delivery.^[2]

So the judge dismissed the claims — without prejudice, meaning Watch Tower remained free to bring them back — and pointed to what remained available. Against Russia that was service through diplomatic channels, a method Russia itself conceded would be proper. Against Almazov he noted the other methods the statute allows for state-owned bodies, including delivery arranged by court order.^[2]

The building, and how it changed hands

What follows about the property and how Watch Tower came to hold it is Watch Tower's own account, set out in its complaint: at this stage of a case a court takes a plaintiff's allegations as given rather than deciding whether they are true.^[2] The Russian and European court decisions described below are matters of record.

Jehovah's Witnesses have been present in Russia since 1891 and faced close to a century of persecution before 1990 legislation let them worship openly. Soviet authorities then registered the Administrative Centre of Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia as the national religious body, and in the early 1990s it bought and renovated the St Petersburg complex it named the Bethel Facility.^[2]

The Administrative Centre transferred the property to Watch Tower — a U.S. non-profit that supports Witness worship worldwide — through gift contracts executed in 2000 and 2010 and registered with Russian authorities. Under those contracts the Administrative Centre kept using and running the facility free of charge in exchange for maintaining it. Watch Tower says it paid 172 million rubles, roughly $3 million, in land and property taxes after taking ownership.^[2]

In March 2017 Russia's Office of the Prosecutor General asked the Russian Supreme Court to declare the Administrative Centre an extremist organisation. That April the court ordered it liquidated, a decision that effectively banned Witness activity nationwide; Watch Tower was barred from taking part in the proceeding and its appeal failed.^[2]

Because the Bethel Facility was still in Watch Tower's name, Russia then moved separately to void the gift contracts. In December 2017 a Russian district court annulled them as fictitious — under Russian law, a transaction "concluded only for appearances, without the intention to create corresponding legal consequences." The reasoning turned on the arrangement itself: because the Administrative Centre had gone on occupying the buildings at no cost and remained responsible for their upkeep, the court concluded it had "essentially continu[ed] to exercise authority as an owner."^[2] Watch Tower's appeals failed.

On 19 February 2019 Russia permanently transferred the site to Almazov, which uses it for biomedical research and medical training. Watch Tower says it has been denied access ever since.^[2]

Why Strasbourg produced nothing for Watch Tower

Both Watch Tower and the Administrative Centre took applications to the European Court of Human Rights, and Watch Tower's was held back while the other proceeded.^[2] On 7 June 2022, in Taganrog LRO and Others v. Russia, that court held the liquidation to be a violation of international law and ordered Russia either to return the Bethel complex or pay €38,243,874, about $42 million.^[2]

The award, however, went to the Administrative Centre, not to Watch Tower. In deciding who owned the property, the Strasbourg court took the Russian ruling annulling the gift contracts at face value and treated the complex as the Administrative Centre's — the very organisation Russia had dissolved five years earlier.^[2]

On the same day that judgment came down, Russian legislators voted to remove the country from the court's jurisdiction, and Russia has not implemented the award. According to the complaint, neither Watch Tower nor the Administrative Centre has been paid anything.^[2]

What has not been decided

The five-count complaint, filed on 3 September 2024,^[3] alleges expropriation in breach of international law; trespass, or wrongful occupation of another's property; unjust enrichment, meaning a benefit gained at another's expense that ought to be repaid; civil conspiracy, an agreement among the defendants to carry the scheme out together; and, in the alternative, that they helped one another do all of the above. It seeks money damages.^[2]

Russia, its Ministry of Health and Almazov are represented in the case by U.S. counsel — Kevin Arthur Meehan and Juan Otoniel Perla, who appeared for Almazov in December 2024 and for the Russian state defendants in February 2025.^[3] Their motions to dismiss ran well past the delivery question, contesting the court's authority over the subject matter, the adequacy of the papers themselves, and whether the complaint states a valid legal claim at all.^[2]

The court has never reached any of it. Both the September 2025 and July 2026 opinions turn entirely on service, and the earlier one said so expressly: "The Court does not reach Defendants' alternative arguments for dismissal."^[2] As of the 23 July opinion, the central question the statute poses — whether a U.S. court can hear a claim against Russia over property inside Russia — was still undecided.

Watch Tower is represented by Paul Polidoro.^[3] The step the judge has now authorised is sending the papers again, this time through the State Department. The St Petersburg complex has housed a state medical research institute since February 2019,^[2] and as of the July opinion Watch Tower remained shut out of it.^[1]