Jehovah's Witnesses

The Jehovah's Witnesses are a Restorationist millenarian denomination originating in the late-nineteenth-century Bible Student movement of Charles Taze Russell and reconstituted institutionally under Joseph Franklin Rutherford in 1931. The denomination operates internationally under the central direction of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York and the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, headquartered at Warwick, New York, with approximately 8.7 million baptised members worldwide as of the most recent published statistics.

Jehovah's Witnesses entries currently in this archive concern the Australian Royal Commission's 2015 Case Study 29 findings — most prominently the documentation that Watchtower's internal records identified 1,006 alleged perpetrators of child sexual abuse within the Australian Jehovah's Witnesses community over six decades, none of whom had been reported by the denomination to civil authorities. The denomination's scriptural-procedural "two-witness" rule, derived from Deuteronomy 19:15 and applied to internal disciplinary processes around abuse allegations, is the central methodological focus of the parallel inquiries that have followed in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Norway, and Finland.