Religion – Weltanschauung – Recht [ RWR ]

The case concerned the disruption of a Jehovah’s Witness religious meeting by armed riot police and the detention of its participants.

The applicants, Nikolay Krupko, Dmitriy Burenkov, Pavel Anorov, and Nikolay Solovyov, are Russian nationals who are Jehovah’s Witnesses belonging to various congregations in Moscow. On 12 April 2006 four hundred people, including the four applicants, were about to celebrate the annual Memorial of the Lord’s Evening Meal, the most solemn and significant religious meeting for Jehovah’s Witnesses, when the police arrived in substantial numbers and cordoned off the university building rented for the occasion. 14 men, including the four applicants, from the congregation were segregated from the rest of the group and, taken to minibuses under police escort, were driven to the local police station where they remained for about three hours, until after midnight.

The four applicants brought proceedings before the national courts to complain in particular about the disruption to their service and their detention in the police station. The courts held, in a final judgment of March 2007, that the police had lawfully stopped the service as it had been held on unsuitable premises under domestic law and that the three hours spent by the applicants at the police station could not be considered as detention.

Relying on Article 5 (right to liberty and security), the applicants complained about the unlawfulness of their arrest and detention on 12 April into the early hours of the following morning, claiming that they had not been invited to the police station, as alleged, and had had no choice but to follow the police otherwise they would have been accused of resisting the police. Further relying on Article 9 (freedom of thought, conscience, and religion), the applicants complained about the disruption to their religious meeting by the police, pointing out in particular that their service, a solemn religious rite, could not have caused any major noise or disturbance and that the massive display of police force and vehicles had suggested that the police intervention had been a well-planned raid aimed at harassing Jehovah’s Witnesses in Moscow.

• Violation of Article 5
• Violation of Article 9
• Just satisfaction: € 30,000 to the four applicants jointly (non-pecuniary damage) and € 6,000 jointly (costs and expenses)

Press release ECHR 184 (2014) 26/06/2014