Appeal court upholds a Jehovah's Witness ministerial servant's call-up after an official inspection found his delivery to the recruitment centre broke a clergy rule

Ukraine's Eighth Appellate Administrative Court, which sits in Lviv, dismissed on 3 September 2026 the appeal of a Jehovah's Witness ministerial servant against the three orders that called him up during mobilisation, sent him to a military unit and enrolled him there as a cadet — a soldier under training. The case had been heard at first instance by the Rivne District Administrative Court, which refused his claim on 16 February 2026. That judgment now stands unchanged.^[1][2]

Both judgments record, among the facts no party disputed, that an official inspection had found officials of the recruitment centre in breach of order No. 25609 of 16 December 2024 issued by the Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine's armed forces — the order that bars the detention and forced delivery to recruitment centres of clergy belonging to religious organisations registered in Ukraine. Police had delivered this man to the centre on 22 April 2025. Everything else followed within 48 hours: medical board, summons, call-up order, posting to a unit.^[1][2]

Neither court treated that breach as a reason to cancel any of the three orders. Neither mentions it again after listing it among the established facts.^[1][2]

The claimant is not named here because he is not named in the record. Ukraine's Unified State Register of Court Decisions, the free public database in which both judgments are published, replaces private parties with placeholders, and in this case it also masks his address, the recruitment centre, the military unit and the body that carried out the inspection. The judges are named: the appeal was decided by S. M. Kuzmych, presiding, with A. R. Kurylets and O. I. Mikula; the first-instance judgment was given by Judge N. V. Druzenko, sitting in Rivne.^[1][2]

This is a separate case from the appeal the same Lviv court dismissed on 19 August 2026, which came from Ivano-Frankivsk and concerned a man who had posted a deferment application before his call-up. JW Files covered that one separately.^[3]

(English renderings of Ukrainian text in this article are ours.)

The terms the case turns on

Ukrainian law has two different call-ups, and which one a man falls under decides this case. The peacetime one is строкова військова служба — fixed-term military service, or conscription, served for a set term. The wartime one is mobilisation, which draws on people already entered on the military register. Ukraine has been under martial law — the emergency legal regime under which certain rights may be restricted for a stated period — since 24 February 2022, and general mobilisation was declared the same day; both are still running. The Mobilisation Law has its own name for the stretch of time this creates, the special period (особливий період): it opens when mobilisation is declared or martial law introduced, and covers the time of mobilisation, wartime and the period after hostilities end.^[1]

Calling people up locally is the work of a territorial recruitment and social support centre, known by its Ukrainian initials, ТЦК. It keeps the military register, summonses those on it, and its head signs the call-up orders. The one in this case was a district (районний) centre; the register does not say which. It is called the recruitment centre below.^[1]

Alternative (non-military) service is civilian work done instead of military service by people whose faith does not permit them to use weapons. A law of 12 December 1991, No. 1975-XII, fixes where it is done: at enterprises, institutions and organisations in state or communal ownership, or in which the state or a local community holds the predominant share of the charter fund, and whose activity lies primarily in social protection, health care, environmental protection, construction, housing and utilities or agriculture — and in the nursing service of the Ukrainian Red Cross Society. Under a Cabinet regulation of 10 November 1999, No. 2066, the decision to send someone to that service is taken by the local state administration, central government's arm in each district.^[1]

A deferment (відстрочка) postpones a call-up. Article 23 of the Mobilisation Law, No. 3543-XII of 21 October 1993, lists who receives one and who is not to be called up at all. Since a Cabinet procedure of 16 May 2024, No. 560, the route runs through a commission attached to the recruitment centre, and requires an application with a package of supporting documents.^[1]

Bronyuvannia (бронювання), "reservation", is the other way off the call-up lists, and it attaches to a post rather than to a belief. A Cabinet procedure of 27 January 2023, No. 76, provides that every clergyman liable for military service is to be reserved — but only where his post appears on a list drawn up by the State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience, the state body responsible for religion and freedom of conscience. That list was approved as order No. Н-21/11 of 5 February 2025 and registered with the Ministry of Justice on 19 February 2025.^[1]

Three Witness terms run through the certificate at the centre of the case. A dedicated, baptised Witness is one who has made a personal commitment to God and been baptised as the public sign of it. A ministerial servant — the Ukrainian is служитель (диякон) збору, servant or deacon of the congregation — is an appointed man who assists with the practical running of a congregation; the certificate describes the post as that of a священнослужитель, a minister or clergyman. The Governing Committee that issued the appointment is the leadership of the Religious Organisation "Religious Centre of Jehovah's Witnesses in Ukraine", the denomination's registered body in that country. It is not the Governing Body, the small group that leads the denomination worldwide.^[1]

Three tiers of court can look at an administrative case. The first-instance court — here a district administrative court — decides it. An appellate court reviews that decision and may quash it, meaning wipe it out. Cassation, in the Supreme Court, is the last and narrowest tier. The judgment an appellate court delivers is a postanova. Where the first-instance court has used the simplified procedure — a lighter track that in this case ran without the parties being summoned — the appeal may likewise be decided on the papers, with no hearing.^[1]

Two days in April 2025

On 22 April 2025 officers of the National Police delivered the man to the recruitment centre. Both judgments record that he was on a police search list for breaches of the military-registration rules.^[1][2]

His registration data were brought up to date. A military medical commission examined him and found him fit for military service, a result recorded in certificate No. 2025-0422 1827-1910-3 of that day. He also completed a psychological assessment and a preliminary interview and signed for both. The same day he was handed summons МР 1018/1, for call-up during mobilisation, and signed for that too.^[1][2]

Also that day, the head of the recruitment centre issued order No. 494. Its paragraph 9, subparagraph 9.1, records him as a soldier called up for military service during mobilisation for the special period, assigned to a military unit with effect from 22 April 2025, under a mobilisation instruction of 28 March 2025.^[1][2]

And also that day, he lodged an application with the head of the recruitment centre, registered as No. 6598. In it he wrote that on 4 December 1999 he had taken a serious and considered step and become a dedicated, baptised Christian, and that his Bible-trained conscience meant he refused to take up weapons or take part in any activity directly or indirectly supporting war. He also refused, in the same document, any work or service — at the front, in hospitals and other medical institutions, or at enterprises, institutions and organisations connected with the armed forces or the Ministry of Defence, at their direction or with their funding — as well as any work of a defence character and any labour obligation.^[1][2]

He asked for three things: a deferment covering the whole mobilisation period; a written answer telling him which state body has the power under martial law to send citizens to alternative service, so that he could apply to it; and a reasoned written reply by registered post.^[1][2]

Attached to the application was certificate No. 530 of 9 January 2025, signed by the chairman of the Governing Committee and sealed by the Religious Organisation "Religious Centre of Jehovah's Witnesses in Ukraine". It records him as a dedicated, baptised minister of the Religious Association of Jehovah's Witnesses in Ukraine since 28 July 2007, and states that on 29 November 2019 the Governing Committee appointed him to the post of minister — servant, or deacon, of the congregation.^[1][2]

The next day, 23 April 2025, the unit commander's order No. 117 appointed him a cadet in a training platoon of a training company in the individual-training school's training battalion, and entered him on the unit's personnel lists and on all forms of supply. On 24 April 2025, on the courts' account and on that of the unit's own order No. 118 of the same date, he left the unit самовільно — without authorisation. That order suspended his pay and struck him off clothing and food supply. His own case was that he did not regard himself as a serviceman at all.^[2] (The appellate judgment gives the date of his departure as 24 March 2025, which falls before the events it describes; the date used here is the one in the first-instance decision.)^[1][2]

He filed his claim on 18 December 2025. His case, as both judgments set it out, was that he had told officials repeatedly, orally and in writing, that he belonged to the Religious Association of Jehovah's Witnesses and had provided written proof; that on religious grounds he refused military service and wished to use the right, guaranteed by Article 35 of the Constitution, to have it replaced by alternative service; and that he had been called up under compulsion and delivered under compulsion to the place of service, which he left because he did not regard himself as a serviceman.^[1][2]

The recruitment centre contested the claim. Ukraine offers alternatives to military service in peacetime and citizens may use them freely, it argued, but in wartime the duty to defend a country attacked by Russia falls on every citizen regardless of faith, and no religious conviction can be a ground for a man found fit for service to evade mobilisation. The military unit filed no defence at first instance.^[2]

The inspection finding

The inspection finding enters both judgments in the same terms, and in both it is introduced as a matter that is не є спірною та визнається усіма учасниками — not in dispute and admitted by all participants. This is the appellate court's version, with the register's placeholders left standing: ІНФОРМАЦІЯ_7 is the inspecting body and ІНФОРМАЦІЯ_3 the recruitment centre, each masked by the register. The first-instance text is identical but for the placeholder numbers.

— "…[the inspecting body], following an inspection of the relevant petition, established a breach by officials of [the recruitment centre] of order No. 25609 of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine of 16 December 2024, in the part concerning the prohibition of the detention and forced delivery to recruitment centres of persons who are clergy of religious organisations registered in Ukraine."^[1][2]

The judgments say neither who made that petition nor what followed the finding.^[1][2]

What the claimant asked the courts to cancel were the three orders — the call-up, the posting to the unit and the cadet appointment. He did not ask them to rule on the delivery itself. The first-instance court records the inspection finding as the last of the facts it established and then turns to the law; the appellate panel reproduces the same paragraph and likewise does not come back to it. Neither judgment addresses whether a delivery made in breach of the Commander-in-Chief's order affected the validity of what followed it.^[1][2]

Why the courts said no

The reasoning runs along several lines, and the appellate panel adopted the first-instance court's on each of them.^[1][2]

Alternative service, on the courts' reading, replaces conscription and not mobilisation. The 1991 law, as both judgments quote it, says the service "is introduced in place of fixed-term military service." Reading that provision together with the rest of the legislation, each court then added a word of its own — саме, "specifically" — and treated the result as a ceiling: alternative service is introduced in place of саме строкової військової служби, fixed-term military service and nothing else. The first-instance judge marked the emphasis by putting «строкової військової служби» in quotation marks. The Mobilisation Law, for its part, does not provide for alternative service under martial law at all. Because this man was mobilised rather than conscripted, the appellate panel held, he "не наділений правом бути направленим на альтернативну (невійськову) службу" — "is not endowed with the right to be sent to alternative (non-military) service."^[1][2]

Appellate authority on that reading is divided, though not evenly. The Sixth Appellate Administrative Court in Kyiv held on 23 April 2026, in a judgment that is final and not open to appeal, that Ukrainian law does not clearly confine alternative service to fixed-term service.^[4] The Lviv court has gone the other way. A differently constituted panel of it, on 25 May 2026, adopted the same reading as the panel here, calling fixed-term service "єдиним видом служби" — the only kind of service for which the law provides a substitute. That panel nonetheless allowed the Witness's appeal in part, on a ground unconnected with religion: it quashed a recruitment centre's call-up order of 14 June 2024 in so far as it called him up and sent him to a unit, while refusing his separate complaint about the way he had been brought to the centre, on the ground that it had not been established that the formal compulsion measure he objected to was used on him.^[5] Neither judgment in this case mentions either of those rulings.^[1][2]

The courts read the deferment grounds as a closed list. Article 23 of the Mobilisation Law sets out an exhaustive list of people who are not to be called up. The paragraph he cited in his application covers heads of ministries and their deputies and heads of state bodies with nationwide jurisdiction; the courts found nothing to show he fell into any such category.^[1][2] The Mobilisation Law, the appellate panel added, provides no deferment for believers on the military register and lays down no procedure for alternative service under martial law.^[1]

On clergy reservation, both courts found the paperwork missing. Clergy can indeed be reserved, and the approved list of posts includes a minister employed by a religious centre, board, congregation, monastery, brotherhood, mission or religious college who is authorised to conduct worship, rites and ceremonies and to preach, and who is in an employment relationship with the organisation. But no evidence was put before either court that he had been entered on any religious organisation's reservation list, or that documents had been sent to the State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience to reserve him.^[1][2]

The courts also found that he had applied to a body with no power to decide. On their account he did not, at any point between the start of the full-scale invasion and his mobilisation, approach the local state administration where he lives with a reasoned written application to be sent to alternative service; no evidence to the contrary was produced. He raised it only once the recruitment centre had begun mobilising him, and he raised it with the recruitment centre, which — both courts held — has no power to decide such a request. Nor was there evidence that he had applied for a deferment through the commission and the documents package that the 2024 Cabinet procedure requires.^[1][2]

Both courts held that a membership certificate alone does not prove conviction. Such a certificate, they reasoned, cannot be the only proper evidence of a person's religious beliefs, and so did not establish the firm, settled and sincere convictions that would show he rejects any participation in a defensive war — including participation that involves neither carrying nor using a weapon.^[1][2]

On the European Convention on Human Rights, the appellate panel set out the standard framework for Article 9, which protects freedom of thought, conscience and religion: the freedom to manifest a religion is not absolute and may be limited where the limit is lawful, pursues a legitimate aim such as public safety or the rights of others, and is proportionate. Neither the Convention nor the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, it said, expressly provides a right to refuse military service on grounds of conscience. It cited Bayatyan v. Armenia, Papavasilakis v. Greece and Kanatli v. Türkiye for the proposition that such a refusal falls within Article 9 where it is driven by a serious and insurmountable conflict between military duty and conscience — and Enver Aydemir v. Türkiye and Dyagilev v. Russia for the proposition that a state may require a certain level of proof and may refuse the request where the proof is not supplied.^[1]

Its conclusion followed the Supreme Court's judgment of 13 June 2024 in case No. 601/2491/22: "жодні релігійні переконання не можуть бути підставою для ухилення громадянина України, визнаного придатним до військової служби, від мобілізації…" — "no religious convictions can be a ground for a citizen of Ukraine found fit for military service to evade mobilisation…"^[1]

The panel also picked up a point the first-instance judge had made about the content of his application. Because he had refused not only weapons but hospital work, defence work and any labour obligation, both courts held that "зміст заяви є абсолютно алогічним" — "the content of the application is absolutely illogical" — since he asked for an alternative to military duty while saying that no alternative would satisfy him. That characterisation is the courts'.^[1][2]

Where the case stands

The appeal was opened on 14 April 2026 by a ruling of the same three judges, which sent the case to be decided on the papers because the first-instance court had used the simplified procedure.^[6] The judgment records that "Відзив на апеляційну скаргу поданий не був" — no response to the appeal was filed — and that under the Code of Administrative Procedure its absence does not prevent review.^[1]

On the day it gave judgment the same panel issued a separate ruling extending the time for deciding the case, and set out why. Under a decision of the High Council of Justice, the body that oversees the judiciary, the court has 37 judge posts; as of June 2026 only 35 judges were exercising powers. On State Judicial Administration indicators for the time cases take, an appellate administrative case needs an average of 405 minutes; the ruling puts the number of judges the court's 2026 caseload would properly require at 468. The presiding judge received 2,235 cases in 2025, still had 1,382 before him at the end of that year, and received 1,539 more between 1 January and 31 July 2026.^[7]

The judgment took legal effect on the day it was delivered, 3 September 2026. It states that it is not open to cassation appeal, except in the case provided for in point 2 of part 5 of Article 328 of the Code of Administrative Procedure — a narrow statutory exception the judgment does not describe. The register made the text publicly available on 7 September 2026. No costs were awarded. The Ukrainian legal newspaper Sudovo-yurydychna hazeta reported the ruling on 14 September 2026.^[1][8]

Both courts closed on the same practical point: that he could be given military duties that involve no weapon at all — food supply and catering, communications, vehicle repair, the building of fortifications. The first-instance judge added one sentence that the appellate panel did not repeat.

— "The religious motives on which the claimant rejects even that possibility are at present unclear to the court."^[2]