A Madrid judge accepts that Jehovah’s Witnesses can be classified as a “destructive sect” and the followers of him as “victims”

Justice has dismissed a lawsuit filed by the procedural representation of Jehovah's Christian Witnesses of Spain against the Spanish association of victims of that confession religious by considering that the right to freedom of expression prevails over the right to honor said confession.

In his ruling, in which he acquits the Spanish Association of Victims of Jehovah's Witnesses "of all the claims formulated in his contra", the head of the Court of First Instance number 6 of Torrejón de Ardoz, Raquel Chacón, collects numerous criticisms from former members of that religious confession against certain practices or abuses that they experienced.

In that sense, it points out that it is "legitimate criticism of certain widespread behaviors carried out by the religious denomination of Jehovah's Witnesses, not only in Spain, but also abroad" and emphasizes that "only the movements of faithful, or former faithful, of any religion, that publicly denounce abuses of a spiritual nature or sexual or sexual abuses Any order, discrimination or degrading treatment, irregularities, etc., can cause them to disappear."

The judge's text also accepts that the Association qualifies as a "sect" to the Jehovah's Witnesses: "As for the classification of this as a destructive sect (...) it must be understood protected by freedom of expression , despite being annoying or hurtful.

In this regard, he emphasizes that the religious texts of the Jehovah's Witnesses "can be considered in our days as excessive control over the lives of the faithful" and highlights that "the insistence on knowing details of certain relationships, sentimental or not, distrusting testimonies or the obligation to consult the elders first, respecting a strict hierarchical system , reveal an environment of insistent supervision" on the faithful.

Regarding the classification of "victims", it points out that "numerous people claim to have suffered a lot of damage as a result of their experience as followers of a religious confession, and prohibiting this term in the name of the Association would be an unjustified censorship for these people who freely express their opinion based on first-person experiences.

The lawyer Carlos Bardavío, author of the book Sects in Criminal Law< a i=4>, has congratulated the Spanish association of victims of Jehovah's Witnesses for the sentence, which he described as his "greatest judicial victory to date."

"As the headline says, the ruling recognizes that Jehovah's Witnesses carry out excessive control of their members and this can be criticized as a sect," he wrote in a Twitter message, in which he also disseminated that sentence in full: