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FRANCE: Anti-cult FECRIS membership collapses from 57 to 19 associations

Photo: The Marseille Courthouse. Credits

FRANCE: Anti-cult Federation FECRIS membership collapses from 57 to 19 associations

FECRIS, a non-profit association under French law now headed by a Belgian Socialist politician, has suddenly withdrawn from its website 38 of its member associations. See why below in the article published by the European Times titled “Did anti-cult federation FECRIS lose at once 38 member associations, or did fake numbers before? by Jan Leonid Bornstein”

Version en français

The European Times (22.05.2023) – FECRIS is the European Federation of Centers for Research and Information on Sects and Cults, an umbrella organization funded by the French government, that gathers and coordinates “anti-cult” organizations throughout Europe and beyond. It has been the subject of several of our articles recently, for their support to the Russian propaganda against Ukraine, which had started far before the current invasion of Ukraine, but recently culminated through their Russian representatives.

In France, FECRIS is currently on trial, following a lawsuit filed by an NGO with UN consultative status named CAP Freedom of Conscience. The UN NGO is asking the Court of Marseille to disband FECRIS, due to its illegal activities, which include their support to their Russian members which are rabid attackers of Ukraine.

Table of Contents

FECRIS under scrutiny
Members “not authorized” to answer
Fake members or disaffected ones
Faking the list

FECRIS under scrutiny

Feeling under scrutiny since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, FECRIS had first hidden from their website the names of their Russian associations. But that did not prevent 82 Ukrainian prominent scholars to write to President Macron asking the end of FECRIS funding by the French government. So recently, FECRIS has merely taken off the whole list of its members from its website. Meanwhile, the Russian Orthodox “anticultist” and anti-Ukrainian attacker Alexander Dvorkin was still part of the board of FECRIS, after having been its vice-president for 12 years, a kind of thorn in the side of FECRIS, struggling with its court case and its international catastrophic reputation.

A few days ago, a new list was put on their website, which of course did not mention anymore any Russian member-association. But interestingly enough, the list which contained 57 associations before the war, is now made of only 19 members… It’s a definite downfall. The listing is preceded by a warning: “any association (and its members) not included in this list is not or no longer part of FECRIS”. Does that mean that FECRIS is terminatedly shrinking, or that its 57 members where fake? That is what we wanted to understand.

Members “not authorized” to answer

So, we wrote to all current and “former” members of FECRIS asking a few questions about these new changes. Most of our requests remained unanswered, including with the President of FECRIS Belgian deputy André Frédéric, but we got a very few, but insightful, responses.

An Italian association which had been unlisted, S.O.S. ANTIPLAGIO, answered that they were not aware of having been unlisted and had not been warned in advance about it.

The Treasurer of FECRIS Didier Pachoud refused to answer and said that he would prefer that the answers come from the President of FECRIS. He said that he forwarded him the questions (which I had already sent) but I never heard back from the President.

The former President of FECRIS, Friedrich Griess, started by answering that he was not authorized to answer. Authorized by whom? I insisted politely and asked him what he thought of the numerous statements of Alexander Dvorkin and other Russian members of FECRIS regarding the war in Ukraine and the fact that Ukraine would be run by « cultists » manipulated by the West. He finally told me that he “was aware of the situation”, that he did “not support in any way the politics of Mr. Putin” and was “very unhappy about the actual situation because” he is “a good friend of Mr. Dvorkin”.

Finally the director of A.V.P.I.M. – Association des Victimes des Pratiques Illégales de la Médecine, Belgium, made an interesting answer. He explained to me that he was not in contact with FECRIS for 15 years, so before Alexander Dvorkin became the Vice President of FECRIS, and added that he had never been an active member of FECRIS. As his association was prominently featured as affiliated on FECRIS website in 2022, that triggered some curiosity.

So I randomly assessed some of the 38 associations that have been unlisted.

Fake members or disaffected ones

One of them, a Swedish group called Föreningen Rädda Individen (“Save the Individual Association”), had their website disappear end of 2020, and their last articles at this date were from 2017. So it looks that the association was not active for the last 6 years whilst it stayed on the FECRIS member list until recently.

Another one, NSS, National Spiritual Security of Armenia, had a website address that sends you directly to the National Security Service of Armenia, the main intelligence service of the country. Does that mean that FECRIS is actively working with that intelligence service, as they did with the FSB and other intelligence services in many states? God knows. But for sure, this “member”, whether it never existed or was really the Armenian intelligence service, had a taste of fake.

The association listed under the name S.A.D.K. – Schweizerische Arbeitsgemeinschaft gegen destruktive Kulte, in Switzerland, was in fact an Evangelical Center of Information, which for the French FECRIS, may taste a bit unsecular.

One of the disappeared associations, Sektenberatung Bremen (“Cult Advice of Bremen”), from Germany, seemed to be a one-man operation, has no website and since the late 90s there is no news about it anywhere.

Association of Religious Study Centers, in Kazakhstan, had only a Facebook page which does not exist anymore at least since 2021. It was never scanned by Web.archive.org before.

A FECRIS association in France named Attention Enfants (“Beware Children”) had their website vanished after May 2021. At this date, the last article on the website was dated 2006.

A Lithuanian association named C.P.B.- Cult Prevention Bureau never had any website, and no activity of such an association can be found on the internet, even in Lithuanian. Did it ever exist? Here again, God knows.

As we already explained in November, the Dneprpetrovsk City Center for the help to Victims of Destructive Cults “Dialogue”, in Ukraine, “has not published anything one line on their website since 2011. It looks like this member association stopped its activity more than 10 years ago but still remained on the FECRIS website to increase the number of members.” FECRIS had tried to defend itself against the accusations of being pro-Russian by stating they had Ukrainian members, but in fact one of them was not active for 10 years, and the other one was a pro-Russian Ukrainian operation.

A FECRIS association in Norway called Foreningen Redd Individet (“Save the Individual Association”) had no website and can’t be found anywhere on Internet, at least with rapid research, besides being listed on FECRIS associated websites. Maybe it existed nevertheless, but before the existence of Internet…

Infosec, in Moldova: No activity, no website. On the website of the unlisted FECRIS group Pancyprian Parents Union, in Cyprus, the last publications are dated 2010. In Sweden, RAM – Riksorganisationen Aktiva mot Manipulering (“National Organization Active Against Manipulation”) has no website and no activity. Then, the association in Ukraine named U.N.I.A. – Ukrainian Network “InterAction”, got their website disappearing in 2014, but even then, no article had been posted since June 2010.

Faking the list

No need to continue further. There are in fact two groups that have been unlisted from FECRIS website: one is the group of Russian members, whom FECRIS has supported for more than a decade and only disappeared when the risk for FECRIS reputation became too big for keeping them aboard. Through them, FECRIS has been an active supporter of Russian propaganda against Ukraine. Russian members had their main leader, Alexander Dvorkin, as Vice President of FECRIS until 2021 and he was member of the board until March 2023. FECRIS has never made any public statement to denounce the anti-Ukrainian activities of its members, and on the opposite, they have condoned their propaganda for years, inviting them to speak at their annual symposiums, along with official members of the French and Belgian governments.

The other group, maybe the biggest, is made of associations which in fact had stopped their activity long ago, if they ever had any. FECRIS was keeping them in the member list for one reason: look bigger when they were begging for subsidies from the French government.

Photo: André Frédéric, FECRIS President,, President of the regional Walloon Parliament in Belgium, former member of the Belgian House of Representatives (1999-2018) and president of the Belgian anti-cult group Aviso, and Thierry Valle, President of CAP-LC. From Twitter.

Further reading about FORB in France on HRWF website

FRANCE: Trial for the dissolution of the FECRIS: First round

Photo: The Marseille Courthouse. Credits

Photo: The order of May 15, 2023, by the Court of Marseille.

FRANCE: Trial for the dissolution of the FECRIS: The anti-cultists lose the first round

On May 15, the Court of Marseille rejected FECRIS’s motion to dismiss, and sentenced the anti-cult organization to pay the corresponding expenses.

by Massimo Introvigne

Bitter Winter (22.05.2023) – Readers of Bitter Winter are familiar with the wrongdoings of FECRIS, the European Federation of Centers of Research and Information on Cults and Sects, an umbrella organization federating anti-cult movements in different countries and whose main financial support comes from the French government. FECRIS spreads throughout Europe and beyond the faulty and pseudo-scientific anti-cult ideology.

It has also cooperated for years with the bloody repression of groups stigmatized as “cults” by the totalitarian regimes of Russia and China. Since the democratic Maidan Revolution and the first Russian invasion of Ukrainian territories in 2014, the Russian branch of FECRIS has actively supported the aggression against Ukraine. It has fabricated for it a main tool of anti-Ukrainian propaganda, the false claim that the Maidan Revolution was organized by “cults,” that “cults” dominate the Ukrainian government, and are exported by Ukraine into Russia to destabilize the Putin regime.

While after the second invasion of Ukraine of 2022, FECRIS has tried to separate itself from Russian anti-cultists, and hide its past cooperation with its Russian branch, the latter had started its anti-Ukrainian campaign in 2014 and even earlier after the first Maidan of 2004, not in 2022. It has continued it during the long years when the most notorious Russian anti-cultist, Alexander Dvorkin, was Vice President of FECRIS, from 2009 to 2021.

FECRIS continuously spreads hate speech against the groups it singles out as “cults.” FECRIS leaders in conferences and interviews have called for example the Church of Scientology “a cancer” and quoted approvingly a definition of the Jehovah’s Witnesses as “a paradise of pedophiles.”

FECRIS member associations have been sentenced repeatedly for defamation, and FECRIS itself lost a landmark case against the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Hamburg, Germany, in 2020, where it was found guilty of 18 counts of untrue factual allegations. It tried to falsely claim that it had won the case in public, while admitting it had lost it in its closed-door meetings. FECRIS asked, and partially obtained, to have its legal expenses in the disastrous Hamburg case paid by French taxpayers through the funds it receives from the French government.

Not all turn the other cheek to FECRIS’ aggressions. On September 10, 2022, an NGO with consultative status at the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) called Coordination des associations et des particuliers pour la liberté de conscience (CAP-LC, Coordination of Associations and Individuals for Freedom of Conscience) summoned FECRIS before the Court of Marseille to obtain its dissolution, based on the accusation that it carries out illegal activities. (Paradoxically, FECRIS also has a consultative status at ECOSOC, although leading scholars of religions, including Ukrainian academics who remember the long anti-Ukrainian activities by its Russian branch, have asked that such status be withdrawn).

According to a summary by the Court of Marseille in an order dated May 15, 2023, in its writ of summons CAP-LC “recalls that it [CAP-LC] was founded for the defense of religious minorities and new religions, which FECRIS denounces as ‘cults.’ It relies on article 3 of the law of 1901 on associations, which provides for the nullity of association which pursues an illicit goal, and of its article 7, which offers to any interested party the possibility of acting in dissolution for this reason.

CAP-LC maintains that its social object of promoting religious freedom is threatened by the illegal activities of FECRIS, which is linked to the Russian power and to a radical fringe of the Orthodox Church, and through one of its affiliates participates in the installation of a Christian Orthodox religious hegemony and the discrimination against religious and spiritual minorities.

It bases its request for dissolution on the dissemination of discriminatory and defamatory statements in 2006, 2009 and at conferences in 2015 and 2016 against minority religious movements and the assimilation of several other organizations and movements to cults. CAP-LC indicates that these remarks were made by prominent members of FECRIS. It maintains that the associations belonging to FECRIS and their members trivialize a pseudo-legal-scientific discourse aiming at assimilating religious minorities to cultic deviances.

It recalls a conviction of FECRIS for defamation by a German court in 2020, and the multiple judicial condemnations in France from 1997 to 2015 against associations linked to FECRIS, and therefore part of its international network, notably UNADFI and GEMPPI. It denounces the misuse of subsidies that FECRIS has received from the French Prime Minister for the organization of a conference in 2020, which was carried out online and whose funds were used to pay for the courts cases it lost.”

On January 13, 2013, FECRIS filed a motion to dismiss the case based on two arguments. The first was that CAP-LC as an association had not been attacked by FECRIS and therefore lacked legal interest or standing to sue the same FECRIS. In fact, FECRIS even argued that the nullity of an association contract is a “relative nullity” that can only be claimed by a member of the association itself.

Second, FECRIS relied on the statute of limitations of the action, in that it was brought more than five years after the incorporation of FECRIS in 1994.

On May 15, the Court of Marseille rejected FECRIS’ motion to dismiss and sentenced it to pay Euro 1,500 to CAP-LC as contribution to its expenses.

On the first claim, CAP-LC’s alleged lack of legal interest, the Court observed that CAP-LC is a French association in good standing whose statutory aim is the protection of religious liberty. “It follows from the combination of articles 3 and 7 of the law of July 1, 1901, the Court stated, that any interested party can request the judicial pronouncement of the dissolution of an association when it has an illicit object or contrary to the laws.

The plaintiff denounces a list of the facts imputed to FECRIS that are likely to undermine its object insofar as they are against freedom of conscience and religious freedom. In support of its claims, CAP-LC provides documents emanating from FECRIS members, or reproducing remarks it claims were made during FECRIS conferences. It will be up to the trial judge to rule on the proof of these facts and their influence on the validity of the association’s purpose. If they were accepted as true, they would be likely to damage the statutory object of CAP-LC. It follows that, at the stage of admissibility, the organization CAP-LC has a legal interest in acting.”

On the second claim, concerning the statute of limitations, the Court noted that in a case of dissolution the date when the prescription period starts is not the date of incorporation of the association, but the date of the last unlawful act committed. The court observed that CAP-LC claimed that FECRIS acted illegally in 2018 and 2020, and that some of its illegal acts were continuing at the time of the summons. As a consequence, the statute of limitations does not apply.

FECRIS has lost a first round of this important case. We know that in democratic countries the independence of the judiciary is a fundamental principle. We also know that the judiciary operates in a political and social context, which in France is hostile to movements stigmatized as “cults” and supportive of anti-cult organizations such as FECRIS.

Yet, the decision of May 15, in the first case when FECRIS is in court in France as a defendant and one in which its very existence is at risk, is a positive development. It recognized that, “if the facts were accepted as true” (and they are supported by a massive documentation), they would prove that FECRIS is an organization threatening freedom of religion or belief.

*******************************************************

Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.

Photo: FECRIS President, Belgian Senator André Frédéric, and Thierry Valle, President of CAP-LC. From Twitter.

Further reading about FORB in France on HRWF website

RUSSIAN FAKE NEWS CORNER: JWs prepare an anti-Putin coup!

Jehovah’s Witnesses prepare an anti-Putin coup, says Russian lawyer Alexander Korelov

FECRIS-connected anti-cult lawyer Alexander Korelov claims he has all the evidence: Russia will react and “destroy the United States, the spiritual garbage dump of humanity.”

How often will the Belgian Federal Parliament go on hosting conferences stigmatizing minority belief communities?

HRWF (18.10.2022) – On 19 May 2017, Alexander Korelov, the lawyer of several well-known radical Russian Orthodox propagandists hostile to Jehovah’s Witnesses and other religious minorities in Russia, such as Alexander Dvorkin, was invited by FECRIS (European Federation of Research and Information Centres on Cults and Sects) at the Belgian Parliament to a controversial conference chaired by Belgian MP André Frédéric.

The Belgian politician is the president of AVISO, identified as an anti-cult association in Belgium affiliated to FECRIS. In 2021, he was appointed president of FECRIS after being a member of their board for several years, along with Alexander Dvorkin, former vice-president of FECRIS for several years and known as an extremist Orthodox propagandist and cult-hunter. This Belgian personality is very useful for FECRIS as he can give them access to the premises of the Belgian Federal Parliament for their conferences and hereby enjoy a certain aura and apparent but false legitimacy.

On 14 June 2022, André Frédéric hosted another FECRIS conference, as its president, in the premises of the Belgian Federal Parliament. And he published an article in a leading francophone newspaper Le Soir referring to their fight for assistance to victims of cults. Victims of any sort of perpetrators always deserve to be helped but in the case of FECRIS, the so-called assistance hides an ideological anti-cult agenda. In reality, FECRIS, its affiliates and other anti-cult groups repeatedly stigmatize and libel a number of belief or religious groups they do not like or they were formerly members of but they have lost quite a number of cases in various courts, an area that HRWF has specifically investigated.

So, how long will the Belgian Federal Parliament go on tolerating conferences stigmatizing minority belief communities?

Alexander Korelov claims to have evidence that Jehovah’s Witnesses prepare a coup against President Putin, says Bitter Winter in a breaking news published on 17 October. Though, it is worth reminding that Jehovah’s Witnesses are apolitical, conscientious objectors to military service and opposed to violence.

Russia has now imprisoned 100 Jehovah’s Witnesses (95 men and 5 women) for the peaceful practice of their religion. This is the highest since the 2017 Russian Supreme Court ruling that effectively banned the Witnesses’ activities.

The 100^th Witness to be imprisoned in Russia is Dmitriy Dolzhikov, 44. He was arrested in September after Russian officers raided 13 homes of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Chelyabinsk. (see link to report) Dmitriy was subsequently transferred to a pretrial detention center in Novosibirsk Region, over 900 miles away from his home.

Sergey Klimov, 52, has been in prison the longest—since June 2018. (link) Another 249 of Jehovah’s Witnesses have been to prisons and pretrial detention centers, some of whom have spent more than five years behind bars. Russia has persisted in persecuting Jehovah’s Witnesses, which has included beating and torturing believers, despite the European Court of Human Rights’ 2022 judgement by that declared Russia’s ban unjustified and illegal. (link)

Scope of the repression of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia and Crimea:

303 criminal cases, involving 643 believers, across71 regions
100 in prison
18 under house arrest
1,789 homes of Witnesses raided since the 2017 Russian Supreme Court ruling that liquidated the Witnesses’ legal entities in Russia and Crimea

In Ukraine and in Ukrainian Crimea, until its annexation in 2014, no Jehovah’s Witness was ever imprisoned for the practice of his/her religion. On which side are the anti-cultists?

Sensational revelations: Jehovah’s Witnesses prepare an anti-Putin coup

by Massimo Introvigne (*)

Bitter Winter (17.10.2022) – https://bit.ly/3exE6ER – On October 13, during the conference “Religion, War and Peace” at the University of Bordeaux-Montaigne’s Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Rosita Šorytė discussed a “sensational revelation” about a coup against the Putin regime that is reportedly under preparation in Russia.

The revelation was launched in Russia on October 11 by the website of Archpriest Alexander Novopashin, the Vice President of the Russian national anti-cult umbrella organization Russian Association of Centers for Religious and Cultic Studies (РАЦИРС/RATsIRS), which is connected with the European anti-cult federation FECRIS. The graphic presentation of the article including the revelation is reminiscent of traditional Russian anti-Semitic iconography.

The statement is by a well-known Russian lawyer, Alexander Korelov, which regularly helps or represents leading anti-cultists such as Alexander Dvorkin or the same Novopashin when they are accused of defamation by groups they stigmatize as “cults.” Korelov introduces himself as “lawyer of RATsIRS.” In 2017, the Secretary General of the MIVILUDES, the French governmental anti-cult mission, Anne Josso, shared the stage in Brussels with both Dvorkin and Korelov at a conference organized at the Belgian Parliament by the FECRIS. To this very day, a text by Korelov appears on FECRIS’ official website.

Korelov claims that after it was “liquidated” and banned in Russia in 2017, “the extremist cult of the Jehovah’s Witnesses did not cease to operate. As we expected, they went underground, holding their meetings in safe houses, receiving instructions from the American center through instant messengers, blogs, and so on. But lately the picture has changed. From the leading centers located in the United States, instructions are sent to the illegal divisions of the cult in our country through ‘closed’ channels, which indicate an attempt by the cult to organize a coup d’état in Russia similar to the Maidan in the now former Ukraine.”

Not without noting the use of the expression “former Ukraine,” we can focus our attention on Korelov’s thesis that “in Russia, the Western intelligence services intend to repeat the already developed scheme, implemented in Kyiv in 2014. Its essence is this. To begin with, ‘peaceful protesters’ are being taken out onto the streets, the backbone of which is primarily adherents of cults,” among which the lawyer mentions also Pentecostals and Scientologists. Then, “all kinds of dissatisfied elements, the mentally ill, drug addicts, criminals and just curious people are drawn to them. Everything seems to start peacefully, under pacifist slogans. Gradually, the crowd begins to ‘warm up’ with specially trained provocateurs, as well as on social networks.” And finally, the government is reversed: “According to the information at our disposal, this is precisely what is being intensively prepared in the milieu of cults. Now we have absolutely certain data that Jehovah’s Witnesses are turning from an extremist organization into a terrorist one. We warned about this already several years ago.”

Perhaps overlooking the fact that the Jehovah’s Witnesses moved their headquarters from Brooklyn to Warwick in 2016–2017, Korelov insists that “the leaders from the Brooklyn center are turning Russian adherents into cannon fodder to achieve their goals. Just like in Ukraine, the United States is fighting with the hands of Ukrainians and mercenaries, so in Russia they are ready to waste biomaterial they do not need in the form of adherents of this cult. The American leadership of Jehovah’s Witnesses is made of people unencumbered by moral standards. They are ready for anything. At the same time, ideological support is being launched among American-sponsored religious scholars, who have already started talking about the need for a ‘rehabilitation’ of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

The Jehovah’s Witnesses are accused of operating “‘sleeping’ extremist cells under the leadership of their center in the United States. And the fact that the Brooklyn [again] center of this cult is under the complete control of the American secret services is not longer a secret.” Pentecostals, Scientologists, and even “neo-Pagans” are also being prepared by the U.S. intelligence to support the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ coup, or so Korelov believes.

All these “cults” are described as “just puppet organizations in the hands of a behind-the-scenes puppeteer. This is an element of the socio-political structure of the United States, which they are trying to impose on the whole world. It is also obvious that all American cults are guided from a single center,” a claim also recently promoted by Novopashin.

“Cults” and the United States themselves are portrayed by the lawyer as “something vile, unworthy. Notice the stupidity of their leaders. The same Hubbard—the founder of Scientology—was a degenerate personality. What about the false prophecies of the Adventists? It clearly smacks of mental illness. Therefore, when mentioning American cults, you can twist your finger at your temple. The United States is the spiritual garbage dump of humanity. I have never taken their public-state matrix seriously. In their country there are no people capable of thinking globally, there is no knowledge of their own, everything is bought. Primitive, in a word. […] The United States has a very vulnerable socio-political system that can be destroyed in a few months. You just need to know their vulnerabilities and be able to influence them.” Russia had not destroyed the United States immediately, Korelov explains, “because too abrupt changes mean hundreds of millions of people who die from wars and upheavals in all countries. I doubt that anyone is ready to take responsibility for such sacrifices. Everything must be progressive and carefully thought out. This is the art of politics.”

However, the lawyer believes that the events in Ukraine and now the preparation of an anti-Putin coup through the Jehovah’s Witnesses represent the beginning of the end for the United States, as Russia could not fail to react. “Russia is not at war with Ukraine. Russia, in fact, is at war with the Satanists of the West FOR Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, to save people, to protect them from the arbitrariness of the United States and other pseudo-democratic states.” In Ukraine, he claims, “there are US bacteriological laboratories that spread the infections around the world, there are secret concentration camps where Ukrainians are tortured and killed, they organize the trade in Ukrainian children and much more. I have seen how the brainwashing technologies of the cults turn the people of the former Soviet republic into zombies. […] The once flourishing Soviet republic of Ukraine has been turned into a Nazi hell by the American occupiers. I can say with absolute certainty that the United States is carrying out genocide of the population of Ukraine. They methodically send Ukrainians to their death under the pretext of confrontation with Russia, they shoot and hang, or corrupt Ukrainian children in towns and villages. It is scary to watch when our troops enter the villages, and there are dozens of hanged children”—hanged by “the United States and NATO.”

One can regard these preposterous claims as the ravings of a lunatic. However, Korelov is really a well-known lawyer in Russia, and the web site that published his revelations is an official organ of both the Russian main anti-cult organization and the Russian Orthodox Church. He has even spoken at the Belgian Parliament, together with the crème of Western anti-cultists and the Secretary General of a French governmental agency. Accusing the peaceful and non-political Jehovah’s Witnesses of terrorism and of preparing a coup is obviously ridiculous. However, “revelations” of this kind serve as warrants for further persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses and devotees of other groups labeled as “cults.”

“I know that Russia, a country of believers and traditional values, has a much greater development potential than the entire ‘collective West’ put together,” Korelov concludes. Besides, “God is with us. We will win.”

(*) Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.

Photo: Rosita Šorytė discussing Korelov’s revelations at the Bordeaux conference (Bitter Winter)

Further reading about FORB in Russia on HRWF website

Further reading about FORB in Belgium on HRWF website

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