News and primary-source research on the Watchtower organization
Jehovah's Witnesses closed on the 432,989-square-foot 'Blue Lake' facility across the lake from their New York world headquarters on June 26, 2026, for an undisclosed price.
Germany's Federal Court of Justice quashed a Cologne ruling and remanded the dispute over the Kusserow family archive held in a Dresden military museum. Ownership remains undecided.
In a unanimous but not-yet-final Chamber judgment (application no. 49687/16), the ECHR held that Italy's decades-long failure to ratify an intesa kept Jehovah's Witnesses out of the otto per mille tax-funding system. The Court awarded EUR 10,000 and EUR 8,000 in costs, dismissing a claim that had sought more than EUR 200 million.
In Velev and Others v. Bulgaria, a unanimous ECHR Chamber found a Shumen ordinance banning "religious propaganda at residents' homes" violated Article 9. No damages were awarded, the applicants were never fined, and the ruling is not yet final.
A Governing Body update makes the storage and reinfusion of a patient's own blood a matter of personal conscience — the latest move in an 80-year doctrine that keeps shifting in one direction. Transfusions of donor blood remain prohibited.
In Governing Body Update #5, released on jw.org on August 22, 2025, David Splane addressed 'additional secular education' and, per ex-member transcriptions, presented it more as a personal choice than the spiritual risk decades of Watchtower literature had described.
A 2024 change retired the word "disfellowshipping" for "removed from the congregation" and eased a single rule about greeting former members. But the announcement, the no-socializing, and the shunning of critics all remained — and the change arrived just as the practice faced its sharpest legal test in Europe.
The three-part series Sobrevivir al Paraiso: Mas alla de los Testigos de Jehova premiered on HBO Max on 20 February 2026, tracing former Spanish members' accounts of abuse, shunning, and legal action. Reception has so far been mixed and thinly covered by major outlets.
The three-part series, released March 2024 on RTL's streaming service, is built on testimony from 57 former members and covers abuse, shunning, and apocalyptic teaching.
On March 9, 2023, a former member opened fire during a meeting at a Hamburg Kingdom Hall, killing six people and an unborn child before taking his own life. He held a legal firearms permit, and a warning weeks earlier had gone unacted upon — reopening Germany's debate over its gun laws.
In December 2017 a St. Petersburg court cleared the way for the state to take the Witnesses' former national headquarters — a 14-building complex owned by a U.S. entity — as fallout from the 2017 ban.
On February 22, 2023, the organization behind Jehovah's Witnesses announced in one sentence that Governing Body member Anthony Morris III 'no longer serves' — gave no reason — and then scrubbed his recorded talks from jw.org over the following weeks.
The confidential 274-page "Shepherd the Flock of God" — which governs the Witnesses' judicial committees, the two-witness rule, and disfellowshipping — was leaked and published, exposing the internal disciplinary system to public view.
The "Palmer Leaks" — 33 confidential documents published by the transparency site FaithLeaks — detailed how Jehovah's Witnesses elders and headquarters handled abuse allegations inside one congregation.