Two distinct clusters of documented controversy run through Jehovah's Witnesses' record, each examined by an outside authority with power to compel evidence.
The first is child sexual abuse. Government inquiries in Australia, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands have examined the organisation's internal procedures, in particular the requirement that an allegation be established by two witnesses before elders may act, and a historic reluctance to report allegations to civil authorities. Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, in its final report released December 2017, examined the organisation's own internal case files and found they recorded allegations against 1,006 members, with no case referred to police by the organisation itself; the commission recommended the organisation abandon the two-witness rule for handling such allegations internally. The organisation has revised some internal procedures since and continues to dispute characterisations of others.
The second is state suppression. On 20 April 2017 the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation ruled the Administrative Center of Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia and its constituent local religious organisations extremist, banning the faith outright, ordering its property confiscated and exposing individual members to criminal prosecution; the European Court of Human Rights later ruled against Russia on the point. Across both clusters the organisation's documented response has been the same posture it takes toward outside authority generally: procedural cooperation and continued public dispute of specific findings, with no reconciliation statement comparable to those some other bodies in this atlas have issued.