The French governmental anti-cult agency MIVILUDES (Interministerial Mission for Monitoring and Combating Cultic Deviances) has lost yet another case against the French Jehovah’s Witnesses—the Fédération Chrétienne des Témoins de Jéhovah de France (FCTJF). Just as it happened on June 14, 2024, the Administrative Court of Paris ruled that a number of passages concerning the Jehovah’s Witnesses in a MIVILUDES report were defamatory.
On July 11, 2025, the Administrative Court of Paris examined nineteen passages of the 2021 annual report of the MIVILUDES that the Jehovah’s Witnesses considered defamatory, but the mission had refused to delete from the document. The court found parts of eleven of the nineteen passages defamatory and ordered them deleted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which is responsible for the MIVILUDES and was the defendant in the case.
Interesting to see that made them remove this:
that members of this religious movement are discouraged from turning to these [secular] courts; and finally, that their leaders do not proceed, as required by criminal law, to report certain criminal offenses to the justice system, particularly those committed against minors.”
The court dismissed the Ministry’s objections that these statements are corroborated by a controversial report of the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, and by three declarations by apostate ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses. An Australian report “is not, in itself, sufficient to establish that Jehovah’s Witnesses in France reject the justice system,” the court commented. “The three testimonies submitted in defense [by the Ministry] are not sufficient to contradict the evidence” presented by the FCTJF (sworn testimonies and written documents) all proving that they comply with France’s child abuse reporting laws and that their internal ecclesiastical disciplinary procedure does not obstruct reporting to the French authorities.