ECtHR: Jehovah’s Witnesses rights violated by Azerbaijan
The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) gave two judgments on cases related to religious freedom last Thursday 20 February. In both cases, the Strasbourg-based court found that Azerbaijan infringed the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) by interfering with preaching activities and with imports of religious literature.
In Nasirov and Others v. Azerbaijan (application no. 58717/10), the applicants claimed that they were unlawfully detained by the police for several hours after having preached door to door. Some of them were additionally fined by domestic courts for distributing literature which had not been approved for import.
The ECtHR found that this was a breach of the right to liberty and security under Article 5(1) ECHR, in particular because the need to escort the applicants to a police station was not justified and because this deprivation of liberty was not documented at all and constituted unrecorded and unacknowledged detention. It also found a violation of the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion in Article 9 ECHR. Specifically, the ECtHR noted that the restriction of the applicants’ rights were not supported by convincing evidence and that, in particular, no evidence of improper methods of proselytising by members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses community was produced or examined in the domestic proceedings.
In Religious Community of Jehovah’s Witnesses v. Azerbaijan (application no. 52884/09), the applicant was the religious community as a whole. The applicant complained about an import ban on several Jehovah’s Witnesses texts, which had been put in place by domestic authorities arguing that the titles in question contained passages which were hostile towards other religions and beliefs.
The ECtHR considered that, by refusing to allow the import of religious literature, Azerbaijan breached the freedom of expression under Article 10 ECHR. Specifically, the ECtHR accepted that the reasons adduced by domestic authorities to justify the ban to imports were legitimate according to the margin of appreciation doctrine. Nevertheless, domestic authorities failed to carry out a comprehensive assessment of the circumstances of the case and to balance the rights of the applicants and of the community as a whole. Moreover, domestic courts did not refer to any specific circumstances indicative of a sensitive background at the material time – such as the existence of interreligious tensions or an atmosphere of hostility and hatred between religious communities in Azerbaijan – in which the impugned statements might have unleashed violence, given rise to serious interreligious frictions, or led to similar harmful consequences.
The judgments are available here (for Nasirov and Others v. Azerbaijan) and here (for Religious Community of Jehovah’s Witnesses v. Azerbaijan).
