UPDATE: Request for Grand Chamber review pending in European Court ruling that Italy discriminated against Jehovah's Witnesses

Update, 7 October 2026: a request to send the case to the Grand Chamber is pending. The Court's official copy of the judgment now carries the notice "Demande de renvoi devant la Grande Chambre en cours", which means "request for referral to the Grand Chamber pending." This appears in HUDOC, the Court's public case-law database, as retrieved on 7 October 2026.^[1] The Grand Chamber is the Court's top panel of 17 judges. A request to refer a case to it works somewhat like an appeal, but it is granted only in exceptional cases. The request means the 11 June ruling is still not final. The €18,000 award is not yet payable. It would fall due only if the request is turned down. If the Grand Chamber takes the case, its own judgment will decide any award.

The notice does not say which side made the request. In its advance list for the 21 September panel meeting, the Court grouped requests under "submitted by the applicants" and "submitted by the Government." This case was not among the 12 requests listed for the panel meeting of 21 September 2026.^[8] A panel of five judges will decide whether the Grand Chamber takes the case. If it accepts, the Grand Chamber will hear the case afresh. If it refuses, the June judgment becomes final on the day of the refusal. The "What happens next" section below has been updated.

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 could ask within three months of the judgment for the case to be referred to the Grand Chamber. That window ran to about 11 September 2026.^[1]

One of the two sides did ask. As of 7 October 2026, HUDOC marks the judgment "Demande de renvoi devant la Grande Chambre en cours", meaning a request for referral to the Grand Chamber is pending. The notice does not identify which party filed it.^[1] The request now goes to a panel of five judges, who decide whether the case raises a serious question important enough for the Grand Chamber.

• If the panel accepts, the Grand Chamber will re-examine the case and issue a judgment of its own. That judgment would be final.
• If the panel refuses, the 11 June Chamber judgment becomes final on the day of the refusal. The three-month period for Italy to pay the €18,000 then begins.

The case was not on the list for the panel's 21 September 2026 meeting.^[8] The Court announced that September meeting in advance and published the panel's decisions afterwards.

The ruling also leaves a wider question open: what Italy will do about the intesa. The judgment does not order Parliament to ratify it. The Court's role is to find the violation and award compensation, and the choice of remedy is left to the State.^[1]

On 2 October 2026, the judgment was the subject of a press conference at Italy's Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Parliament. It was organised by LIREC, a research centre on freedom of religion, belief and conscience which, its director said, works to expose discrimination against religious minorities. The event was arranged with the help of deputy Roberto Giachetti. According to the Protestant news agency NEV, the speakers were LIREC's director Raffaella Di Marzio, the retired Prime Minister's Office adviser Anna Nardini, and the lawyers Omero Nardi and Marcello Rifici. Nardini said she had often found "insufficient knowledge" of Jehovah's Witnesses and "numerous prejudices" in parliamentary committees. Di Marzio pointed to prejudice and what she called distorted media portrayals. Nardi and Rifici went over the history of the agreement and the judgment.^[9] These are the views of the speakers, not findings of the Court. NEV's report does not mention the referral request.

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]