Canada's Supreme Court ruled that no court can review a Jehovah's Witnesses expulsion

On May 31, 2018, the Supreme Court of Canada answered a question that had never been settled at the country's highest level: when, if ever, can a court second-guess a religious congregation's decision to expel one of its members? Its answer, delivered unanimously by all nine justices, was blunt — essentially never.^[1]

The case was Highwood Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses v. Wall, and it turned a quiet dispute in a Calgary congregation into the leading Canadian authority on how far the courts may reach inside a religious community. For former Jehovah's Witnesses hoping the law might offer redress against being expelled and shunned, it closed a door.

What happened to Randy Wall

Randy Wall was a Calgary realtor and a baptized Jehovah's Witness. In 2014, the judicial committee of his congregation — the Highwood Congregation, an unincorporated association of about 100 members — disfellowshipped him. According to the Supreme Court's account, Wall "admitted that he had engaged in sinful behaviour and was considered to be insufficiently repentant."^[1] The court's case summary was more specific: he had not shown sufficient repentance for "two incidents of drunkenness, one of which included verbal abuse of his wife."^[2]

The consequence was not merely a lost membership. Once Wall was disfellowshipped, other Witnesses — including members of his own family — were obliged to shun him. And because much of his real-estate clientele was drawn from the congregation, the shunning cost him business.^[1][2] Wall asked the congregation's appeal committee to reconsider; it declined. Then he went to court, arguing that the expulsion had been procedurally unfair and should be reviewed.

The road to the Supreme Court

The lower courts let him try. In 2015, the Court of Queen's Bench of Alberta held, after a hearing limited to the question of jurisdiction, that the courts could hear Wall's application. In 2016, a majority of the Alberta Court of Appeal agreed, over a dissent.^[2] The congregation took the jurisdiction question to the Supreme Court of Canada, and the stakes drew a crowd: twelve interveners lined up, among them evangelical, Catholic, Sikh, Seventh-day Adventist, Latter-day Saint, and Muslim organizations, alongside civil-liberties groups — a coalition that spanned the religious spectrum, united by an interest in keeping courts out of internal religious affairs.^[1]

The Court's reasoning

Writing for the unanimous Court, Justice Malcolm Rowe set out three distinct reasons the courts had no business reviewing Wall's expulsion.^[1]

First, judicial review — the mechanism Wall had invoked — exists to check the exercise of governmental power. A private religious congregation exercising no statutory authority is not a public decision-maker, and the fact that its decisions affect people's lives does not make them "public" in the legal sense.^[1]

Second, and more sweepingly, the Court held that there is "no free-standing right to procedural fairness" in the decisions of a voluntary association. A court can step in only where a member has an underlying legal right at stake — one grounded in contract, property, or tort. "Mere membership in a religious organization," Rowe wrote, "where no civil or property right is granted by virtue of such membership — should remain free from court intervention."^[1] Wall had no such right: there was no contract, no property interest, and the harm he suffered — lost clients, fractured relationships, a sense of unfair process — was not, by itself, something the law recognized as actionable.

Third, the Court held that questions of religious doctrine are simply not justiciable — not the sort of thing courts are equipped or entitled to decide. "The courts," the judgment reasoned, "have neither legitimacy nor institutional capacity to deal with contentious matters of religious doctrine."^[1] And because a congregation's disciplinary procedures can themselves be bound up with scripture — the judgment pointed to the Witnesses' handbook and its reliance on the instructions at Matthew 18 — even the fairness of the process could turn on religious interpretation a court has no standing to perform.^[1]

The Court was careful to mark where the boundary lay. In an earlier case, it noted, a court had been able to step into a religious community's expulsion — but only because a member's property interest was directly at stake.^[1] Absent such a legal right, the door stays shut. What set Wall's case apart from an ordinary lawsuit over a broken contract or a seized asset was precisely that his membership conferred no legal entitlement the courts were equipped to protect.

The Court allowed the appeal and quashed Wall's application. It is worth being precise about what that means: the Supreme Court did not rule that Wall's expulsion had been fair. It ruled that no court could review whether it was fair or not.^[1]

What it means — and how it compares abroad

For former Jehovah's Witnesses in Canada, Wall drew a hard line. A person expelled and shunned can still sue — but only where an independent legal right exists, such as a contract, a property interest, or a recognized tort like defamation or assault. The expulsion decision itself, and the shunning that follows, sit beyond the reach of judicial review.^[1] Religious-liberty organizations welcomed the ruling as a strong protection for the autonomy of religious communities; some legal scholars endorsed the outcome while questioning the breadth of Justice Rowe's reasoning.^[3]

The practical reality the ruling left behind is a narrow one. A disfellowshipped Witness who is defamed can still sue for defamation; one who is assaulted can sue for assault; one whose contract or property is interfered with can go to court on those grounds. But the loss at the heart of most shunning stories — the severing of family and community, imposed by a religious decision the person believes was reached unfairly — is, in Canadian law after Wall, simply not something a judge may weigh.

The Canadian approach is worth setting beside the way European courts have handled the same underlying grievance. Where Canada framed the question as one of jurisdiction — courts stay out — European disputes attacked shunning on its substance, through anti-discrimination law and state funding and registration rules. A Belgian court convicted the Witnesses' association over its shunning instruction in 2021, only to see the conviction overturned on appeal in 2022 and the acquittal affirmed in 2023. Norway stripped the organization of its registration and public funding over shunning, a decision the country's Supreme Court ultimately ruled unlawful in 2026.^[4] Different legal routes, and — so far — a common destination: courts, whether by declining to look or by looking and declining to intervene, have largely left the practice of shunning where the Witnesses insist it belongs, inside the faith.