On 26 August, the European Court of Human Rights dominated within the case Erikas Rutkauskas v. Lithuania that the spiritual freedom of a spiritual minister of Jehovah’s Witnesses had been violated for failing to offer him entry to a civilian service changing navy service.
This is the second time lately that Lithuania has misplaced an identical case in Strasbourg. In June 2022, the court docket dominated in favour of one other Jehovah’s Witness minister, Lithuanian citizen Stanislav Teliatnikov, who was residing in Turkey on the time. He additionally refused navy service in 2015 on spiritual grounds and sought an alternate.
The hurdle of the home proceedings
Having been known as on underneath the Law on Conscription to carry out navy service, he refused on the grounds of his spiritual beliefs and conscience. His request to carry out civilian service as an alternative was not answered by the navy authorities, which on 7 September 2015 additionally determined to not exempt the applicant from preliminary necessary navy service. The applicant challenged their selections within the Vilnius Regional Administrative Court, which on 31 October 2017 dismissed the applicant’s enchantment.
The applicant then lodged an enchantment with the Supreme Administrative Court, asking the latter to droop the case and to refer a query to the Constitutional Court on whether or not the State’s failure to incorporate an exemption within the Law on Conscription from each necessary navy service and different nationwide defence service for conscientious objectors breached the precise to freedom of faith.
By a closing ruling of 16 October 2019 the Supreme Administrative Court upheld the impugned selections. It referred to the Constitutional Court’s ruling of 4 July 2017 and the Supreme Administrative Court’s prior ruling of 10 April 2019 (see Teliatnikov v. Lithuania, no. 51914/19, §§ 28-30, 7 June 2022) and held that the constitutional responsibility of a citizen to carry out necessary navy service or different nationwide defence service utilized each to ministers of church buildings and non secular organisations that have been thought of conventional in Lithuania, and likewise to ministers of non-traditional spiritual communities and associations.
There was thus a authorized foundation for holding that the navy authorities’ determination to not launch the applicant from necessary navy service was lawful. Furthermore, the questions associated to the applicant’s standing as topic to navy conscription, resembling whether or not he was medically match to carry out such service, or which sort of service – navy or different nationwide defence service – ought to apply to him, or what the situations of such service must be, weren’t the subject material of the case.
The applicant complained underneath Article 9 of the Convention that regardless of his genuinely held spiritual beliefs and his conscience, he was denied the precise to refuse navy service. Even although he had by no means denied his civic obligations, no different civilian service had been supplied for by Lithuanian regulation.
Some particulars of the choice of the European Court
The European Court pressured that the final rules on freedom of thought, conscience and faith as one of many foundations of a “democratic society” inside the that means of the Convention, and the States’ margin of appreciation on this space, have been set out in
Bayatyan v. Armenia [GC], no. 23459/03, §§ 124-25, in 2011
Adyan and Others v. Armenia, no. 75604/11, §§ 63-65, in 2017
Teliatnikov v. Lithuania, no. 51914/19, §§ 28-30, in 2022
In the final case, Teliatnikov v. Lithuania, no. 51914/19 Teliatnikov (§§ 97-110), the Court discovered that the system of necessary navy service did not strike a good stability between the pursuits of society as a complete and people of the applicant, who had by no means refused to conform together with his civic obligations normally.
Erikas Rutkauskas, as a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, sought to be exempted from navy service on the bottom of his genuinely held spiritual convictions, and had referred to these grounds in his request to the navy authority in 2015, simply as within the case of Mr Teliatnikov.
The European Court held that there had been a violation of Article 9 (freedom of faith or perception) of the European Convention and held that Lithuania was to pay EUR 1,000 in respect of prices and bills.
The court docket ordered the Lithuanian authorities to pay Rutkauskas 1,000 euros in compensation.
Laurynas Šedvydis, chair of the Lithuanian parliament’s Human Rights Committee, instructed BNS information company that the system must be reformed.
“Lithuania ought to guarantee higher alternatives for folks to serve in different methods due to their spiritual or private beliefs,” he stated. “Why, for instance, shouldn’t service within the well being sector be thought of equally beneficial?”
Lithuania reinstated necessary navy service in 2014 following Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
