"This has great significance as a precedent because a lot of people were watching both here and abroad," said Anatoly Pchelintsev, co-chairman of the Moscow-based Slavic Center for Law and Justice and an expert on freedom-of-conscience issues.
"If it had gone against them, then the next day prosecutors across Russia would have opened cases against the Jehovah's Witnesses," he said.
Friday's ruling came 2 1/2 years after city prosecutors filed suit in a district court seeking to deny legal registration to Jehovah's Witnesses in the Russian capital, where they have about 10,000 active members.
The prosecutors argued the sect instigates "religious enmity" by claiming to be the only true religion, endangers members' lives through a prohibition on blood transfusions, and fosters "breakdown (of) families" by placing unreasonable demands on adherents.
The legal arguments are based on Russia's vaguely written law on religion, which was adopted in 1997 over the objections of Western governments, the Vatican and religious freedom advocates. Under the 1997 law, religious groups must be registered by the government in order to legally open bank accounts, rent property or hire employees.
Judge Yelena Prokhorycheva did not explain her decision Friday, but a written decision is expected by the end of this week.
Although the ruling came from a lowly municipal court, it will resonate far and wide in Russia, a country of 145 million people spanning 11 time zones.
"We were keen to fight in Moscow as hard as we could because the prosecutor herself said she hoped that the Moscow decision would lead to a banning throughout Russia," said Paul Gilles, a Jehovah's Witness spokesman, in a telephone interview from the group's national headquarters outside St. Petersburg. "Everybody still looks to Moscow to set the standard."
In theory, because the 1997 law includes ill-defined provisions denying legal status to faiths that are "harmful to society," the Jehovah's Witnesses were vulnerable to dissolution by the court.
To help the Moscow court sort out just what kind of religion the Jehovah's Witnesses have, in March 1999 Prokhorycheva delegated a committee of two linguists, two religion experts and one psychologist to use the Bible and Jehovah's Witnesses literature in determining whether the faith causes "religious discord," destroys families or should be considered a religion at all.
After conducting two years of research, four of the five experts weighed in against the Jehovah's Witnesses. The judge, however, evidently chose to ignore the experts' opinions in ruling against the prosecutor, whose office the judge ordered to pay the experts' fees of about $560 each.
The prosecution's undoing, said Pchelintsev, was to focus on the nature of the Jehovah's Witnesses as a faith.
The Jehovah's Witnesses' victory comes at a time, Pchelintsev added, when religious freedom news in Russia is generally gloomy. Pchelintsev said 30 of Russia's 89 regions are currently in various stages of adopting legislation aimed at curtailing minority faiths' activity. He cited a draft law making its way through the local legislature in the Belgorod region of western Russia that would forbid missionary activity and require minors who wanted to attend a religious service by themselves to get written parental permission.
"It was not even like this in Soviet times," Pchelintsev said, attributing the wave of restrictive legislation to tighter and deeper links between the country's dominant 80 million-member Russian Orthodox Church and the government.
Yelena Ryabinkina, a leader of the Moscow-based Committee for the Rescue of Youth which first asked prosecutors to take legal action against the Jehovah's Witnesses in Moscow, said she hopes the prosecutor will appeal Friday's verdict. With no paid publicity, no fax or answering machine and no paid staff, Ryabinkina said, her group gets about hundred complaints a year from Russia and Ukraine, mostly about the Jehovah's Witnesses.
"These are all people who have relatives who are suffering," said Ryabinkina, a retired engineer.
According to Gilles, the Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia have 115,000 active members -- called "publishers" -- who devote an average of 10 hours a month to spreading the faith. Russia currently has 1,072 Jehovah's Witness congregations as compared to 554 for the entire Soviet Union 10 years ago, he said.
Because of members' insistence on conscientious objection to military service and their high-profile, door-to-door missionary work, the Jehovah's Witnesses have taken part in numerous court battles throughout the former Soviet Union to win legal status.
On Feb. 22, in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, the Supreme Court upheld the revocation of the legal registration of two Jehovah's Witnesses groups. Gilles said the Witnesses have 15,000 publishers in Georgia, an impoverished country of 5 million in the Caucasus.
