On 16 November in Vyborg, near St. Petersburg, the city court will
hold a hearing on a case involving the examination of the New Testament
and the Book of Psalms to determine whether or not they are extremist
literature.
Last July, the Gideons – an evangelical Christian organization that
distributes Bibles and New Testaments for free - wanted to import Bibles
and books of Psalms to Russia which they have been distributing in the
country for years.
The customs of Vyborg, however, called for a linguistic scrutiny by
experts, before letting them enter the territory of the Russian
Federation.
Shortly after, one of the customs service officers in
charge, Serghei Lenin, explained that the refusal to pass the material
was linked to the fact that documentation showing that the books had not
carried an extremist content, as required by law, was not submitted.
As reported by the portal Religia i Pravo, the office of the mission
of the Gideons, Anatoly Pchelintsev, noted that the customs officials
have completely ignored the amendments of 2015 to the law "to combat
extremist activities" and for which the sacred books of the Bible,
Quran, the Tanakh (the sacred texts of Judaism) and Kangyur (Buddhist
canon) can never be considered extremist.
For this, the customs of Vyborg, according to Giodons, should not
have stopped their books because they are the Bible. To confirm this,
the Christian organization had provided the authorities subjected the
texts to the scrutiny of the department of religious studies at Herzen
Russian State Pedagogical University.
But the customs officers did not take into account either the
amendments to the law, nor the analysis of experts and have held 20
thousand books at the border ad interim, so much so that many have been
sent back to Finland where they had been printed.
"What happened can be explained by the ignorance of officials, police
and customs personnel - writes Religia i Pravo - But this is an
oversimplification and does not fully explain the situation. The head of
Customs knows the New Testament, but also knows that whatever is
religious is now suspect in Russia due to the intensification of the
legislation ".