European rights court finds Armenia breached religious freedom by refusing Jehovah's Witnesses permission to build places of worship

The European Court of Human Rights ruled on 1 October 2026 that Armenia breached the religious freedom of Jehovah's Witnesses by refusing the organisation permission to build places of worship on three plots of land it had bought in the capital, Yerevan.

The case is Christian Religious Organization of Jehovah's Witnesses v. Armenia, application no. 5142/16. The Court found a violation of Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights — the article that protects freedom of thought, conscience and religion. It got there without having to weigh the city's reasons at all: the refusals, as the city had written them, pointed to no law that allowed them, and that alone decided the case.^[1]

The judgment turns on evidence rather than on doctrine. Yerevan's mayor's office said the construction of religious buildings in residential areas was inappropriate because neighbours complained; the Court's answer was that neither the mayor's office at home nor the Government in Strasbourg produced any evidence that those complaints existed, and that the refusals themselves named no provision of Armenian law that would have let the city refuse on that basis even if they had.^[1]

What the Convention and the Court are

The European Convention on Human Rights is a treaty of the member States of the Council of Europe, Armenia among them. The European Court of Human Rights, sitting in Strasbourg, decides complaints that a State has broken it. Individuals and organisations can apply to the Court once they have taken their case as far as their own national courts will go — a requirement lawyers call "exhaustion of domestic remedies."

This case was decided by a Committee: a formation of three judges rather than the Court's usual seven-judge Chamber. (Its largest formation, reserved for the weightiest cases, is the 17-judge Grand Chamber.) The Committee was composed of Gilberto Felici as President, with Mykola Gnatovskyy and Vahe Grigoryan; Martina Keller signed as Deputy Section Registrar. The judges deliberated in private on 10 September 2026, adopted the judgment that day, and notified it in writing on 1 October. The text states on its face that the judgment is final, subject only to editorial revision — there is no further stage and no appeal.^[1]

The organisation was represented by S.H. Brady, a lawyer practising in London, and A. Martirosyan, a lawyer practising in Yerevan. Armenia was represented by its Agent, Y. Kirakosyan, the Representative of the Republic of Armenia on International Legal Matters.^[1]

Three plots, three applications

The organisation, which is registered as a religious organisation in Armenia, bought three plots of land in different parts of Yerevan in 2009. The ownership certificates issued in its name recorded that all three were designated for the construction of public buildings.^[1]

On 10 December 2012 it lodged three separate applications with the Yerevan mayor's office for planning permissions. In the Armenian system these are the preliminary approvals a landowner needs before a building permit can be issued and construction can start. Without them, nothing can be built.^[1]

Two of the three were refused in letters dated 20 December 2012. The stated reason was that there had allegedly been incidents in which building religious premises had led to complaints and intolerance from neighbouring residents, and that the mayor's office therefore considered such construction in residential areas inappropriate. As to the third application, the office replied on 21 December 2012 that it was working through urban development issues in that area and would return to the matter once that process was finished.^[1]

The organisation appealed to the mayor on 8 February 2013, asking for the replies to be set aside and for permissions and building permits to be issued for all three plots. With its appeal it filed copies of planning permissions granted in 2009 to the previous owners of two of the three plots, for the construction of public buildings. Those earlier permissions stated expressly that the plots sat in a mixed-development zone.^[1]

On 25 February 2013 the mayor's office answered that it considered the construction of religious buildings in residential areas unacceptable, because it would lead to complaints from neighbouring residents.^[1]

The Armenian courts

The organisation went to court on 1 April 2013, asking the Administrative Court — the court that reviews decisions by public authorities — to set the refusals aside, to declare what it said was the mayor's failure to decide the appeal unlawful, and to order the planning permissions issued. It also argued that its freedom of religion had been breached and that it had been discriminated against.^[1]

While that case was pending, on 31 March 2014, one department of the mayor's office wrote an internal letter to another. Building religious premises on all three plots, it said, was incompatible with the applicable urban zoning plans: one plot lay in an industrial zone, another in a recreational zone, and the third partly in a multi-storey residential development zone and partly in a mixed-development zone.^[1]

The Administrative Court dismissed the claims on 1 December 2014. Its reasoning was that whether religious buildings went up in a community was a question of social and cultural policy belonging to the mayor's discretion, that the courts' jurisdiction over such a question was limited, and that the Convention complaints were unfounded because the refusals rested not on the organisation's beliefs but on a view that religious buildings of any denomination were unsuitable in those particular places.^[1]

The Administrative Court of Appeal partly upheld that judgment on 27 May 2015. It criticised the lower court for reading the mayor's discretion so broadly that it might wrongly suggest the mayor's acts were beyond judicial review — but it held the outcome had still been reached correctly. In the absence of evidence that the zoning plan permitted a place of worship, it said, public opinion had to be taken into account. It relied on the internal letter of 31 March 2014, held that the mayor's office could not be ordered to issue the permissions, and discontinued the remaining claims as not open to judicial review.^[1]

A further appeal to the Court of Cassation, Armenia's highest court for such cases, was declared inadmissible — refused without a hearing on the substance — for lack of merit on 29 July 2015. The organisation applied to Strasbourg on 21 January 2016.^[1]

Armenia's two preliminary objections failed

Before the merits, the Armenian Government raised two procedural objections, and the Court rejected both.

The first was that the organisation had suffered no significant disadvantage — a threshold that can make an application inadmissible — because it already had other places of worship in Yerevan and its members had not been stopped from holding their weekly meetings. The Court replied that in freedom-of-religion cases that threshold must be applied with careful scrutiny, citing Stavropoulos and Others v. Greece. The refusals had effectively prevented the organisation, for many years, from building on three plots it had acquired for that purpose, and the consequences of that could not be called insignificant.^[1]

The second was that the organisation had missed the six-month time-limit then in force for applying to the Court, which Armenia said should have run from the refusal of an earlier planning application on 16 November 2009. The Court held that the 2009 refusal was not part of this case and had not stopped the organisation lodging fresh applications and challenging the refusals that followed. The clock therefore started on 29 July 2015, the date of the final domestic decision, citing Lekić v. Slovenia. The complaint was admissible.^[1]

Why the refusals had no legal basis

Under Article 9, a State may interfere with religious freedom only where the interference is "prescribed by law", pursues a legitimate aim, and is necessary in a democratic society. The three conditions are cumulative: fail the first and the Court need not reach the others. The Court set out the principles governing planning-based restrictions on places of worship by reference to Vergos v. Greece, Association for Solidarity with Jehovah's Witnesses and Others v. Turkey and Religious Community of Jehovah's Witnesses of Kryvyi Rih's Ternivsky District v. Ukraine.^[1]

The refusals, the Court held, interfered with the organisation's freedom of religion. They then failed the first condition on two counts.

Neither the original replies nor the answer to the administrative appeal cited any provision of Armenian law permitting the mayor's office to refuse planning permission on the ground of neighbours' complaints or intolerance.^[1]

And the complaints went unevidenced at both stages, at home and in Strasbourg. Neither the mayor's office in the domestic proceedings nor the Government in the proceedings before the Court produced, in the Court's words, "any evidence whatsoever" that they had been made — even though the burden of proving its case lay on the mayor's office in both the administrative proceedings, under section 43 of the Fundamentals of Administrative Action and Administrative Procedure Act, and in the court proceedings that followed, under Article 29 § 2 (3) of the Administrative Code. Without that evidence the Court could not tell what the complaints were based on, or how far they could legitimately have counted at all.^[1]

The internal letter the appeal court relied on

The Court dealt separately with the 31 March 2014 internal letter, which the Administrative Court of Appeal had leaned on. It could not supply a legal basis for the refusals for a simple reason of timing: it was an internal document written more than a year after the refusals it was being used to justify.^[1]

The Court went further and questioned whether the letter was reliable at all.

• The Government filed extracts of drawings showing land-use designations, apparently annexed to the letter. The drawings gave no origin, date, issuing authority or legal status, so there was no way to tell whether they were part of officially adopted zoning plans in force at the time or merely preparatory planning documents. Neither the Armenian courts nor the Government commented on them.^[1]
• The letter contradicted the city's own earlier statements. The refusals of December 2012 and February 2013 had said the plots were in residential areas; the letter placed one in an industrial zone, one in a recreational zone, and the third partly in a multi-storey residential development zone and partly in a mixed-development zone. Under Armenia's Land Code, residential areas, industrial zones and recreational zones are distinct classifications of land.^[1]
• It was inconsistent with the rest of the file. The 2009 planning permissions issued to the previous owners of two of the plots said both lay in a mixed-development zone, and the organisation's own ownership certificates recorded all three as designated for public buildings. Religious buildings and places of worship were themselves classified as public buildings under Joint Order no. 108-K, issued on 26 May 1998 by the head of the Real Estate State Unified Cadastre and the Minister of Urban Development, as that order stood at the relevant time.^[1]

The interference was therefore not "prescribed by law" within the meaning of Article 9 § 2, which made it unnecessary to ask whether it pursued a legitimate aim or was necessary in a democratic society. There had been a violation of Article 9.^[1]

The complaints the Court did not decide

When it gave notice of the application to Armenia, the Court had put four sets of complaints to the Government: Article 9 alone or together with Article 11 (freedom of assembly and association); Article 6 § 1, on the right of access to a court; Article 14 together with Articles 9 and 11 and Article 1 of Protocol No. 12, both of which concern discrimination; and Article 13, on the right to an effective remedy. The rest of the application was declared inadmissible at that stage.^[1]

Having found the Article 9 violation, the Court held that it had addressed the main legal questions the case raised and that there was no need to rule separately on the remaining complaints, citing the Grand Chamber judgment in Centre for Legal Resources on behalf of Valentin Câmpeanu v. Romania. Those complaints were therefore neither upheld nor rejected on their merits.^[1]

What Armenia must pay

Compensation at the Court is called "just satisfaction", and it comes in two kinds. Pecuniary damage is money actually lost. Non-pecuniary damage covers harm that is not financial.

The organisation claimed EUR 77,380 in pecuniary damage, which it said was what it had spent acquiring, renting, refurbishing and maintaining alternative premises for religious services. It claimed EUR 15,000 in non-pecuniary damage. It also claimed EUR 3,175 for legal representation before the Armenian courts, EUR 464 in domestic court fees and EUR 5,000 for legal representation in Strasbourg, and asked that Armenia be ordered to pay any applicable value-added tax and interest at 8% plus three percentage points from the date of the judgment. The Government contested the claims.^[1]

The pecuniary claim was rejected. The organisation had supported it with three written statements issued by its chairman, which the Court found insufficient to establish the loss reliably or to link it directly to the violation it had found.^[1]

Deciding on an equitable basis, the Court awarded EUR 4,500 for non-pecuniary damage, plus any tax chargeable, and EUR 3,232 for costs and expenses under all heads, plus any tax chargeable to the organisation. The remainder of the just-satisfaction claim was dismissed. Both sums are payable within three months, converted into Armenian currency at the rate applying on the day of settlement; after that, simple interest runs at the European Central Bank's marginal lending rate — the rate it charges banks for overnight loans — plus three percentage points. The operative part of the judgment was adopted unanimously.^[1]

The authentic text was drawn up in English, and the Court has also published an official French version.^[2]

What the judgment does not do is say what should happen to the three plots. The Court's function was to decide whether the Convention had been broken and what compensation was due; it issued no order about the planning permissions themselves.^[1]