Liza Drenicheva Says “Thank You!” to Her World Family

Doug Burton
March 16, 2009

Elizaveta Drenicheva joined a conference call on March 14 to say “thank you” to the Free-Liza working group and the tens of thousands of her supporters worldwide. “I am OK. I didn’t go crazy,” she says, adding that she misses some of her cell mates, who cried the day she left the prison. One fellow prisoner told her: “Because I met you, I now believe in God.”

In recent days Liza has been editing and revising the notes she made while incarcerated. She learned recently that the whole True Family was aware of her legal fight and had kept her in their prayers.

Church officials of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification in Kazakhstan are mulling the possibility of a legal appeal to the next highest court and ultimately perhaps to the Supreme Court of Kazakhstan. As long as the guilty verdict remains, the church members are not free to pursue evangelical work, and the liquidation of the church itself is a possibility. Even now, police agents reportedly are monitoring the movement of church leaders in and out of their homes. The government recently closed and liquidated Almaty’s Church of Scientology and the Hare Krishna mission there.

“Having succeeded to get Liza out of jail, now we have to establish that the teachings of the church are legal,” said Dan Fefferman, head of the International Coalition for Religious Freedom in Washington, D.C.

According to human-rights activists in Almaty, Liza’s case has legal significance because she was the first missionary to be arrested and prosecuted on the basis of the content of her beliefs. Other religious groups, including Baptists, Pentecostals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, have been arrested and prosecuted for not registering their church congregations or not giving information on their membership.

Liza has been getting reacquainted with freedom at the Peace Embassy in Almaty, according to church officials. She was released from a district prison in Almaty on March 11. She reportedly feels fine, although she was ill for part of the two months that she spent in a cold, windowless cell.

An appeals court in Almaty, Kazakhstan, ruled March 10 that the two-year sentence of Elizaveta be commuted to time served (two months). The judge said that she would have to pay fines and court costs totaling about $1,000. The prosecution had asked that Ms. Drenicheva, a Unification Church missionary, be given three years’ probation, but the judge decided that she should be released immediately, with no restrictions. She may return to the Russian Federation because she is a Russian citizen.

On January 9, 2009, Ms. Drenicheva was sentenced to two years in prison by the Almalinsky District Court in Almaty. The judge ruled that she was guilty of a “crime against peace and security of humankind” because she had allegedly taught that certain groups of people are inferior on the basis of their relation to “tribal and class identity.”

In fact, Mrs. Drenicheva was simply teaching the Unification Church’s universal principles on Original Sin based upon scripture, which holds that all human beings are born into a sinful state and need to attain salvation through God’s grace and their own efforts. The Unification Church is an officially registered religion in Kazakhstan and had received no previous indication from the government that its teachings were legally problematic.

Konstantin Krylov, a Russian Unification Church official who attended the hearing, thanked the groups that joined in this campaign to win Ms. Drenicheva's release, in particular the International Coalition for Religious Freedom (ICRF). He said there were about 10 observers in the courtroom, including a representative of the U.S. State Department, an official representing the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and some reporters, including one representing Radio Liberty. On Monday press releases urging that the sentence of Ms. Drenicheva be overturned were issued by the Institute on Religion and Public Policy, the Leadership Council for Human Rights, and the ICRF.

Written by Doug Burton in Washington, D.C.

Updated on March 16, 2009