Last Articles
Who is Mihai Stoian, the Romanian yoga teacher arrested in Georgia and wanted by French justice?
By Willy Fautre
Published in The European Times
On 20 and 26 December 2024, the City Court of Tbilisi held hearings to decide whether Georgia should extradite Mihai Stoian and his wife Adina arrested in August 2024 on the Turkish-Georgian border on the basis of an Interpol arrest warrant issued on France’s request.
A few days after mid-December, I happened to be in Tbilisi for The European Times to cover the unstable political situation and the demonstrations in the country following the contested results of the parliamentary elections and the subsequent election of a new contested pro-Kremlin president by the new parliament. On this occasion, I published two articles titled “GEORGIA: Election of an ex-footballer as the new president booed by demonstrators” and “GEORGIA: Police violence in Tbilisi while President Zurabishvili calls for quick EU actions”. I also used the opportunity of being in Tbilisi to meet state and non-state actors as well as lawyers involved in the case of the Stoians and to collect some unpublished information about the couple. A member of their family was also in Tbilisi.
At the end of the second hearing taking place after my departure from Georgia, the court found that a third hearing was necessary to try to solve a crucial issue: the interpretation of the debates and the translation of printed or written court documents in Romanian, as strongly required by Mihai, his wife and their lawyers instead of the English language imposed until then by the judicial authorities.
Who is Adina Stoian, the female yoga teacher arrested in Georgia and wanted by French justice?
By Willy Fautre
Published in The European Times
On 20 and 26 December 2024, Tbilisi City Court held hearings to decide whether Georgia should extradite Adina Stoian and her husband Mihai arrested in August 2024 on the Turkish-Georgian border on the basis of an Interpol arrest warrant issued on France’s request.
A few days after mid-December, I happened to be in Tbilisi for The European Times to cover the unstable political situation and the demonstrations in the country following the contested results of the parliamentary elections and the subsequent election of a new contested pro-Kremlin president by the new parliament. On this occasion, I published two articles titled “GEORGIA: Election of an ex-footballer as the new president booed by demonstrators” and “GEORGIA: Police violence in Tbilisi while President Zurabishvili calls for quick EU actions”. I also used the opportunity of being in Tbilisi to meet state and non-state actors as well as lawyers involved in the case of the Stoians and to collect some unpublished information about the couple. A member of their family was also in Tbilisi.
At the end of the second hearing taking place after my departure from Georgia, the court found that a third hearing was necessary to try to solve a crucial issue: the interpretation of the debates and the translation of printed or written court documents in Romanian, as strongly required by Adina and Mihai Stoian and their lawyers instead of the English language imposed until then by the judicial authorities.
The Opposition to “Cults” in Various Countries and Its International Coordination
Published in the Journal of CESNUR
By Rosita Šorytė.
ABSTRACT: Opposition to groups stigmatized as “cults” has (re-)emerged in recent years as a significant social force in countries as diverse as China and Argentina. The article examines six national situations—United States, China, Russia, France, Japan, and Argentina—and the different interests inspiring the local anti-cult campaigns. In its second part, the article argues that, while remaining different, anti-cult campaigns also have common elements and are supported by the lobbying efforts of diverse social actors such as the umbrella anti-cult federation FECRIS, the research consortium Invictus, the international diplomatic action of France, Russia, and China, international TV networks that have allied themselves with the anti-cult movements (primarily Netflix), anti-trafficking agencies interested in expanding their activity to “cults,” and private individual and corporate donors. While there is not a single “hidden hand” coordinating the anti-cult activities throughout the world, the role of these coordinating agencies should not be under-estimated. KEYWORDS: Anti-Cultism, Anti-Cult Movement, FECRIS, Invictus, MIVILUDES, Brainwashing.
Police raids on Romanian yoga centers in France, one year later
Many yoga practitioners have filed complaints concerning the conditions of their custody
By Willy Fautre.
Source: Europeantimes.news
Full article here.
On 28 November, it will be one year since a SWAT team of around 175 policemen wearing black masks, helmets, and bullet proof vests, simultaneously descended at 6 am on eight separate houses and apartments in and around Paris but also in Nice where Romanian yoga practitioners had decided to go into spiritual retreat. The police forces were then brandishing semi-automatic rifles, shouting, making very loud noises, crashing doors and putting everything upside down.
The November 2023 raids were not an operation against a terrorist or armed group or a drug cartel. They were raids targeting eight private places mainly used by peaceful Romanian yoga practitioners, but the police suspected these places to be used for illegal activities: traffic in human beings, sexual exploitation and forcible confinement.
MISA: A Call to the Georgian Authorities for the Release of Mihai and Adina Stoian
Eleven scholars and human right activists ask Georgia to resist the long arm of French anti-cult repression and free the two MISA leaders.
Mihai and Adina Stoian in happier times.
We, the undersigned, respectfully ask the authorities of Georgia,
(a) to free on bail as soon as possible Mihai and Adina Stoian arrested in Georgia on August 22, 2024;
(b) to refuse their extradition to France, based on the fact that their alleged “complicity in rape” would have been performed by “mental manipulation” and “abuse of weakness” of women they allegedly persuaded to embrace the beliefs of the Romanian yoga group MISA anchored in foreign philosophies and have private meetings with MISA’s founder;
considering
- that “mental manipulation” and “abuse of weakness” are imaginary crimes and are therefore not part of international law
- that they are defined as crimes in France but not in most other democratic countries
- that the Stoians’ case is a by-product of the prosecution of MISA’s founder Gregorian Bivolaru, who is currently in jail in France with several co-workers.
We are scholars in religious studies and new religious movements and human rights defenders with different levels of knowledge of MISA. Some of us personally know the Stoians and appreciate inter alia Mihai Stoian’s work through the NGO Soteria International in favor of freedom of religion or belief for all.
The Long Arm of France: Why MISA’s Mihai and Adina Stoian Have Been Arrested in Georgia
The two leaders of the movement founded by Gregorian Bivolaru are threatened with “life imprisonment” for the pseudo-crime of “psychological subjugation.”
By Massimo Introvigne
Source here.
Georgian media coverage of the arrest of the Stoians. Screenshot.
On August 22, 2024, Mihai and Adina Stoian, well-known yoga teachers of MISA, the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute, were arrested when they entered in Georgia, as part of a tourist trip, through the border with Türkiye at Sarpi. Georgian media, obviously fed by the police and anti-cultists, reported that the Stoians are wanted in France and have also been prosecuted “in Finland and Romania for child prostitution and rape.” The latter information is false. As far as they know, the Stoians are not under any prosecution in Finland or Romania. Only when they were arrested in Georgia, they were notified of an international arrest warrant from the Court of Paris, France. Of what exactly are they accused?
The Journal of CESNUR
Vol 8, issue 5 sept-oct 2024
Contents:
Articles
- Soka Gakkai’s Interpretation of the Principle “Three Thousand Realms in a Single Moment of Life” and Ikeda’s Climate Action. By Massimo Introvigne
- Ecoselves as Part of Ecosystems: What Can Daisaku Ikeda’s Philosophy and Practice Contribute to a Cultural Transformation Regarding Attitudes and Behaviors Towards Climate Change? By Olivia Fuchs
- The Treasure Tower: The Peace Proposal 2020, Daisaku Ikeda’s “Last Word” on Climate Action. By Rosita Šorytė
Research Notes
- Sacred Eroticism or Sexual Magic? Liselotte Frisk’s Research on MISA by Massimo Introvigne
- The Nylund Report of 2005 and the Frisk Study of 2019: Parallels and Differences. By Rosita Šorytė
- Liselotte Frisk and MISA: An Emic View of a Yoga School and Its Perils. By Camelia Marin
Read here
Yoga: Disproportionate widescale police raids with abuses starting from a personal settlement of scores
Article published on Eureporter.co
The questions raised by this article are:
- What is the origin of such a disproportionate police operation targeting yoga practitioners?
- Which groups are behind these allegations?
Learn more about the French governmental anti-cult agency MIVILUDES.
Read the full article here
More articles on the topic:
https://europeantimes.news/2024/09/france-yoga-disproportionate-raids-abuses-settlement-scores/
A new publication in English - New Journal of Human Rights edited by renowned Romanian political scientist and human rights activist Professor Gabriel Andreescu:
Repression of groups that promote “sacred eroticism”. A collective exercise in cruelty, contempt and hypocrisy
"The brutal and discriminatory treatment of groups that practice sacred eroticism (the category established by Massimo Introvigne) are behaviours reminiscent of the shameful stains on the history of European democracies: sending people to psychiatric institutions because they ”adhere to ideas differing from those which are usually shared by social consensus”, or sending women who had given birth to children out of wedlock to educational centres. The states responsible for these acts (Italy, Ireland) have many years ago repudiated these cruel measures. It would be appropriate for the French authorities, together with the public opinion in the country of Voltaire, to rethink the repressive policy against adults who make a free and voluntary choice of their conscience and therefore follow precepts of their own will". - Quote from the editorial
France, the Anti-Cult Association UNADFI Loses a Case Against CAP-LC
Anti-cultists believed that by reproducing an article by “Charlie Hebdo” they could refuse to correct their defamatory statements, as “Charlie Hebdo” had not been sued. They were wrong.
by Massimo Introvigne
Thierry Valle, President of CAP-LC.
Not for the first time, France’s largest anti-cult organization UNADFI (Union nationale des associations de défense des familles et de l’individu), which is largely financed by the government, i.e., by French taxpayers, was caught red-handed publishing defamatory statements, then refusing to correct them.
On December 2, 2024, the Justice Court of Marseille ordered UNADFI to publish on its website an answer by the UN ECOSOC-accredited CAP-LC (Coordination of associations and individuals for freedom of conscience) to an article the anti-cult group had reproduced on February 12, 2014, from the French magazine “Charlie Hebdo.” During the discussion in the French Parliament of the new anti-cult statute, noting the opposition to the law of the majority of the French senators, “Charlie-Hebdo” had attributed it to the campaign of criticism of CAP-LC, which it accused of being a front for the Church of Scientology and other “cults.” CAP-LC asked the UNADFI to publish its answer to the article, but the anti-cult association refused, which led to the lawsuit.
