How can France continue to support a government agency that has been convicted six times by the French courts in the past year?
MIVILUDES (Interministerial Mission for Vigilance and Combating Cultic Aberrations) is the agency officially responsible, within the French Ministry of the Interior, for monitoring, preventing, and reporting cultic aberrations that may undermine human rights, security, or public order.
On July 11, 2025, the Paris Administrative Court handed down yet another ruling against MIVILUDES. The Christian Federation of Jehovah’s Witnesses of France (FCTJF) had brought the case before the Paris Administrative Court to force MIVILUDES to remove various passages from its 2021 report, which it considered defamatory, inaccurate, discriminatory, and contrary to religious freedom. The court ruled in its favor and ordered the anti-cult agency to remove the passages within fifteen days and to pay financial compensation to the FCTJF.
The court ruled that certain excerpts violated its rights because they misrepresented Jehovah’s Witnesses as systematically refusing to resort to the courts, their internal courts as illegally substituting themselves for the courts of the Republic, the consent of their members to medical care (particularly transfusions) as legally flawed due to community pressure, a form of indoctrination or educational abuse of children, and serious accusations (incitement to rape, concealment of evidence) based on single, dated or unverifiable testimonies.
The court repeatedly emphasized that certain passages in the MIVILUDES report were based exclusively on one or two testimonies, often anonymous or not clearly sourced, old (sometimes more than 20 years old), not corroborated by other material or objective evidence, from people who had left the movement long ago and who did not present themselves as direct witnesses to the events they described.
The court does not reject the principle of using testimonies in a public report, but it points out that: they cannot alone form the basis for general assertions about an entire religious group, especially when they are not corroborated. The number, quality, origin, date, and above all the content of the testimonies must be explicitly specified in order to assess their probative value. It criticizes MIVILUDES for hiding behind vague or isolated testimonies, without mentioning their exact number or reliability, in order to make very general judgments about the practices of all Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The court also notes that certain excerpts from the MIVILUDES report give the appearance of an official position of the State on practices that are allegedly illegal or dangerous, even though they are based solely on these subjective testimonies. The court reiterates that the State cannot rely on unverified, isolated, or old testimonies to make serious accusations against a religious organization. When a public authority such as MIVILUDES asserts that religious practices violate the law or endanger people, it must provide serious and current evidence. Otherwise, this constitutes a violation of the principles of neutrality, proportionality, and the right to religious freedom.
This is the sixth conviction of MIVILUDES by the French courts since June 2024.
On June 14, 2024, MIVILUDES had already been condemned for lying and defaming Jehovah’s Witnesses in its 2020 report. On February 21, 2025, it was condemned for defamatory remarks against the Kibbutz de Malrevers, a Jewish religious group mentioned in the 2020 report.
Then, on May 16, 2025, MIVILUDES was convicted in two separate rulings to compensate the CAPLC (Coordination des Associations et des Particuliers pour la Liberté de Conscience) association and to hand over administrative documents to which it had unsuccessfully requested access, as well as to correct false statements regarding access to administrative documents in its 2021 activity report.
Finally, on May 28, 2025, the Paris Administrative Court has convicted Miviludes and ordered it to give CAPLC documents relating to the huge subsidies it grants to anti-cult associations, even though these documents are administrative documents that can be disclosed.
At this rate, all Miviludes needs is a loyalty card at the administrative court registry. A seventh conviction, and it may be entitled to a mug bearing the slogan “Punitive secularism in complete illegality.” With six convictions in one year, it is no longer monitoring cults, but testing in real conditions what ideological persecution looks like. At this point, it is no longer an interministerial mission, but a legal series. Netflix had better watch out.
