European Court finds Italy discriminated against Jehovah's Witnesses over unratified funding accord

The European Court of Human Rights ruled on 11 June 2026 that Italy discriminated against Jehovah's Witnesses by never ratifying the agreement that would have opened Italy's religious tax-funding system to them. The judgment, in the case Congrégation chrétienne des Témoins de Jéhovah c. Italie (Christian Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses v. Italy), application no. 49687/16, was decided unanimously by a seven-judge Chamber of the Court's First Section, presided over by Judge Ivana Jelić.^[1][2]

The Court found a single violation of Article 14 of the Convention — the prohibition of discrimination — taken together with Article 9 (freedom of religion) and Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 (protection of property). It awarded the applicant €10,000 for non-pecuniary damage and €8,000 for costs, and dismissed the remainder of a claim that had sought more than €200 million.^[1][3]

The ruling turns on a 40-year procedural gap. Italy recognised Jehovah's Witnesses as a legal entity in 1986 and its governments signed an accord with them three separate times, but Parliament never enacted the law needed to bring that accord into force — leaving the denomination outside a funding stream open to comparably situated faiths. Because the judgment was delivered by a Chamber rather than the Grand Chamber, it is not yet final.^[1]

The *intesa* and the *otto per mille*

Two features of Italian law sit at the centre of the case. The first is the intesa — the agreement contemplated by Article 8 of the Italian Constitution. Article 8 provides that the State's relations with non-Catholic religious denominations are regulated by law "on the basis of agreements with their respective representatives." Concluding and ratifying an intesa is, in domestic practice, the gateway to a set of legal privileges reserved for recognised faiths.^[1]

The second is the otto per mille, or "eight-per-thousand." Under a mechanism in force since 1990, Italian taxpayers may direct 0.8 percent of their income tax either to the State or to a religious denomination that has concluded an intesa. The sums are substantial: the judgment records the applicant's figure that the total distributed through the otto per mille in 2016 was roughly €1.257 billion.^[1]

A denomination without a ratified intesa cannot receive that money. Jehovah's Witnesses in Italy — a body the judgment describes, on the applicant's own account, as gathering more than 251,000 adherents — had spent decades on the outside of that system.^[1]

Recognised in 1986, then signed but never ratified

The chronology the Court recorded is the heart of the discrimination finding.

Jehovah's Witnesses were recognised as a legal entity in Italy by Presidential Decree no. 783 of 31 October 1986. Over the following decades, the text of an intesa between the denomination and the Italian State was signed by successive Presidents of the Council of Ministers — the country's head of government — on three occasions: 20 March 2000, 4 April 2007, and 10 November 2014.^[1][6]

None of those signatures produced funding. In the Italian system, a signed intesa still requires Parliament to pass a law giving it effect, and that ratifying legislation was never enacted. The judgment refers only to "the President of the Council in office" at each signing and does not name the individual heads of government involved.^[1]

The result, according to independent coverage, was that Jehovah's Witnesses remained excluded while 13 other minority denominations — reported by Courthouse News to include Jewish, Lutheran, Buddhist, Hindu and Mormon communities — obtained ratified intese and access to the funding system. That count of 13 comes from secondary reporting and is not stated verbatim in the primary judgment.^[4]

Italy's justifications, and why the Court rejected them

The Italian Government did not dispute that the intesa had gone unratified. It argued instead that the difference in treatment was justified by aspects of the applicant's own doctrine and practice.

As the Court recorded Italy's position, the Government pointed to the Witnesses' religiously grounded stances on blood transfusions and blood donation, their historical objection to military service, and their abstention from voting — presenting these as reasons a State could reasonably decline to conclude an agreement.^[1][3]

The Court, at paragraphs 90 to 95 of the judgment, found none of these amounted to an objective and reasonable justification. On the public-health point, it held that the Government had produced no evidence that the Witnesses' opposition to blood transfusions posed a real risk to citizens' health, and that the two domestic precedents Italy cited, from 1985 and 1996, added nothing. On military service, the Court noted that compulsory military and alternative civilian service has been suspended in Italy since 1 January 2005, draining that objection of present force. On voting, it found it had not been shown that abstaining breached any Italian law.^[1][3][5]

The judgment was written in French; the sentence above is an unofficial English rendering of the Court's reasoning at paragraph 91.^[1]

Why a signed-but-unratified accord produced a violation

The Court's legal path drew directly on a recent precedent from Belgium: Assemblée chrétienne des Témoins de Jéhovah d'Anderlecht et autres c. Belgique (Anderlecht v. Belgium), no. 20165/20, decided 5 April 2022. In that case the Court held that when a State creates a tax or funding advantage tied to religion, it must apply the criteria for access without discrimination. Italy's otto per mille system, the Court reasoned, is exactly such an advantage, and the decades-long failure to ratify the Witnesses' intesa — absent any adequate justification — left them treated less favourably than comparable denominations.^[1]

The Court reinforced the point with its own earlier case law on the differential treatment of religious communities, citing Jehovah's Witnesses of Moscow and Others v. Russia (2010), İzzettin Doğan and Others v. Turkey, and Magyar Keresztény Mennonita Egyház and Others v. Hungary.^[1]

Having found the combined Article 14 violation, the Court held it was not necessary to examine separately the complaints under Article 9 or Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 taken alone, nor the complaint under Article 13. Those provisions were therefore not the subject of separate findings.^[1]

Two members of the Chamber, Judges Frédéric Krenc and Alain Chablais, joined a concurring opinion agreeing with the outcome but not with the entirety of the reasoning that led to it.^[1]

The gap between the claim and the award

The just-satisfaction figures show the distance between what the applicant sought and what the Court granted. The applicant had claimed €200,358,518.67 in pecuniary damage — subsidiarily €150,268,889 — reflecting funding it argued it had been denied over the years, along with €75,000 in non-pecuniary damage and about €44,915 in costs.^[1]

The Court awarded a small fraction of that: €10,000 for non-pecuniary damage and €8,000 for costs and expenses, dismissing the rest of the claim. The €18,000 total is payable within three months of the date the judgment becomes final.^[1]

What happens next

Because this is a Chamber judgment, it is not the last word. Under Articles 43 and 44 of the Convention, either party may, within three months of the judgment, ask for the case to be referred to the Grand Chamber — a window running to roughly 11 September 2026. A panel of five judges decides whether to accept any such request. If none is made, or the panel refuses, the Chamber judgment becomes final, and the three-month clock for paying the €18,000 begins from that point.^[1]

What the ruling does not settle is what Italy will do. The judgment does not order Parliament to ratify the intesa; the Court's role is to find the violation and award compensation, leaving the choice of remedy to the State. Whether Italy will now move to ratify the agreement, or instead seek Grand Chamber referral, was not addressed in any government statement located in the sources reviewed for this article.^[1][4]

The applicant welcomed the result. In a statement issued through the organization's own communications office, Alessandro Bertini, a spokesman for Jehovah's Witnesses in Italy, said that "after more than 40 years, the Court has recognized that Jehovah's Witnesses in Italy are entitled to the same fair and equal treatment as any other religion." The remark is the applicant's characterisation of the decision, not a finding of the Court.^[7]