On December 20, 2017, the Leningrad Regional Court left the decision of the Vyborg City Court unchanged despite the failure of the prosecutor or court-appointed “experts” to identify the basis for declaring the New World Translation “extremist.” The court rulings are founded on a single “expert” study that criticized this modern Russian translation of the Bible.

The regional court’s three-judge panel acknowledged that there were contradictions in the study on the New World Translation and summoned for questioning the “experts” who produced the study. When the presiding judge, Larisa Gorbatova, asked Ms. Kryukova, the study’s leading member, whether the New World Translation is a Bible, she replied that it is not, “in the traditional sense of Orthodox Christianity.” When one of the defense attorneys asked for even one quotation in which the rendering of a verse showed signs of extremism, Ms. Kryukova could not provide an answer. Later, Judge Gorbatova asked Ms. Kryukova what constitutes extremism in this translation, but she declined to answer, stating that it was “a legal question.”

When one of the defense attorneys asked for the criteria used to determine whether the New World Translation is a Bible, Ms. Kryukova said that it must be marked “by the blessing of the patriarch” or match word for word with a translation that bears that blessing. Ms. Kryukova was then asked why the study concluded that the New World Translation was “not an adequate translation.” When neither she nor the other “experts” could articulate objective criteria, the court ended the questioning of the “experts.”

The attorneys for the Witnesses then asked the court to accept evidence that exposed the bias of the “experts”—including the study’s large-scale inclusion of material from Wikipedia and from an Orthodox seminary student. The judges granted that request but rejected all petitions to have genuine experts examine the New World Translation and to return the case to trial.