28 July 2026 RUSSIA: Court challenges to denials of alternative service often fail Three Pentecostal conscientious objectors in Udmurtiya failed to overturn Conscription Commissions' rejections of their applications for alternative civilian service. The court agreed with the Military Commissariat in each case that they had "failed to substantiate" their conscientious views. "No matter how we ...

18 August 2026 BELARUS: Criminal cases against exiled religious freedom defenders Police launched criminal cases against two more religious freedom defenders who live outside Belarus: Sergiy Melyanets in January, and Natallia Vasilevich in April. Protestant preacher Melyanets attended court to pray for those on trial until he too was arrested and given short-term detention. Orthodox theologian ...

In early 2024, Russian occupation forces arrested a Protestant in her fifties for participating in a July 2023 prayer meeting in the occupied Ukrainian city of Melitopol. Prosecutors handed her criminal case to Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia Regional Court. In the same court is the criminal case against Ukrainian Orthodox Church priest Kostiantyn Maksimov for alleged "espionage". On 27 April ...

24 April 2025 UKRAINE: How should government deal with conscientious objectors in wartime? The declaration of martial law after Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022 cancelled the limited right to alternative service in peacetime. Hundreds of conscientious objectors to mobilisation – on religious and non-religious grounds - have been detained, forced into the army, held illegally (often for ...

At the instigation of the General Prosecutor, a secret Supreme Court hearing in Dushanbe on 29 March 2021 banned Jehovah's Witnesses for a second time, nearly 14 years after they were first banned in Tajikistan. No one informed the Jehovah's Witness community either before the 2021 hearing or afterwards. They found out about the hearing and renewed ban only when the regime replied to the ...

On 22 September, a Goranboy court jailed 22-year-old Jehovah's Witness Seymur Mammadov for nine months for refusing compulsory military service on conscientious grounds. On 25 July – two days after his 18th birthday – officers seized conscientious objector Royal Karimov and forcibly took him to a military unit in Ganca, where he is still held. Baku's Sabail District Court extended to March ...

Uzbekistan's new Religion Law [signed by the President 5 July, came into force 6 July] maintains almost all the restrictions on freedom of religion and belief in the current Religion Law. It continues to ban: all exercise of freedom of religion and belief without state permission; teaching about religion without state permission; sharing beliefs; and publishing, distributing or importing ...

A Moscow court fined an Anglican Christian three weeks' average wage under Russia's "gay propaganda" law for social media posts citing a Vatican declaration condemning "unjust discrimination" on the basis of sexual orientation and a Scottish Episcopal Church essay on equal marriage. This is the first known time a court imposed such a fine for sharing church documents. Amid ever-tightening laws ...

On 1 April, the Supreme Court rejected Catholic priest Henryk Okolotovich's appeal against his 11-year jail term on treason charges. Both his trial and appeal were closed. In a message from prison, he denied "espionage for Poland and the Vatican". He rejected pressure to implicate the country's Catholic bishops. "Priests are being persecuted to shut our mouths, so that the Catholic Church does ...

At a closed hearing at the Russian-controlled Crimean Supreme Court in Simferopol on 2 August, Zaporizhzhia Regional Court jailed 41-year-old Ukrainian Orthodox priest Fr Kostiantyn Maksimov in a strict regime labour camp for 14 years on "espionage" charges. "I'm in such shock," his mother Svetlana Maksimova told Forum 18. He is likely to be illegally transferred to Russia after any appeal. On ...