(11 Juny 2026)

The European Court of Human Rights' judgment in Christian Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses v. Italy, delivered on 11 June 2026, was far from predictable. The Court unanimously found a violation of Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights, read in conjunction with Article 9 and Article 1 of Protocol No. 1, holding that the situation in which Jehovah's Witnesses in Italy have found themselves for many years amounted to discrimination. This is a significant conclusion because, while the Court did not recognize any right of a religious denomination to obtain an agreement (intesa) with the State, it identified a discriminatory effect in the way Italian institutions handled a procedure that remained unfinished for decades.

To understand the significance of the judgment, it is important to recall that Italian law does not impose any legal obligation on the State to conclude an intesa with a religious community. Article 8 of the Constitution provides that relations between the State and religious denominations other than the Catholic Church are regulated by legislation enacted on the basis of agreements concluded with their representatives. The Italian Constitutional Court has repeatedly clarified that the decision whether or not to open negotiations belongs to the sphere of governmental political discretion and is not subject to any duty to provide reasons.

The Jehovah's Witnesses case is different, however. Here, negotiations were opened, an agreement was reached, and the text was signed several times by successive governments. What never occurred was the parliamentary phase. Parliament neither approved nor rejected the agreement. It simply failed to bring the process to completion. As a result, the religious community was left in an institutional limbo, without a clear political decision and without effective judicial remedies.

In my view, this is one of the most significant aspects of the case. The judgment reveals a problem in the relationship between Government and Parliament regarding the exercise of political authority in matters of church-state relations. In a parliamentary system, governments are normally expressions of parliamentary majorities. One would therefore expect the majority supporting the government that negotiated and signed an agreement either to approve it through legislation or openly to reject it. In the case of Jehovah's Witnesses, neither happened. The result was an indefinite suspension of the process—one that appears excessively political and insufficiently legal.

The Strasbourg Court identified precisely this problem. It did not state that Parliament was under an obligation to approve the agreement. Rather, it found that a system lacking clear criteria, reasonable time limits, and mechanisms capable of preventing a religious community from remaining indefinitely excluded from the benefits associated with an intesa is incompatible with the Convention. The problem, therefore, is not political discretion as such, but the transformation of political discretion into institutional inertia beyond effective control.

A second particularly interesting aspect of the judgment concerns the economic dimension of religious freedom. The discrimination found by the Court was also linked to the exclusion of Jehovah's Witnesses from Italy's otto per mille system, through which a portion of taxpayers' income tax may be allocated to the State, the Catholic Church, or religious denominations whose intese have been approved by Parliament.

For Italian readers, this aspect is especially noteworthy. Traditionally, debates on religious freedom in Italy have focused on institutional autonomy, legal recognition, and equal treatment among religious groups. Economic considerations have generally been regarded as secondary. The otto per mille system has largely been understood as the democratic evolution of the former public financing of the Catholic clergy. Following the revision of the Concordat in 1984, that system was transformed into a mechanism based on taxpayers' choices and subsequently extended to religious denominations that had concluded an intesa with the State.

The European Court adopts a different and more concrete perspective. Economic resources allocated to religious communities are not merely financial benefits. They contribute directly to the effective exercise of religious freedom. Once a State establishes a system of public benefits for certain religious communities, access to that system cannot depend on opaque procedures, indefinite delays, or political decisions that are never actually taken. In this sense, public funding of religious activities becomes one of the instruments through which substantive religious equality is realized.

The judgment also addresses the traditional arguments that have often been invoked to justify resistance to an agreement with Jehovah's Witnesses, particularly the issue of blood transfusions. The Court does not deny the sensitivity of the matter, but it observes that the Italian Government failed to provide sufficient evidence that the religious beliefs of Jehovah's Witnesses could justify the differential treatment they experienced. In other words, the blood transfusion issue cannot serve indefinitely as an excuse for avoiding the real question at stake: equal religious freedom.

The decision may have implications extending well beyond the Jehovah's Witnesses case. The Italian Government continues to develop institutional relations with some religious communities, while effectively ignoring or postponing requests coming from others, including several Muslim organizations that still encounter considerable difficulties even in initiating negotiations for an intesa. The judgment does not eliminate the political discretion recognized by the Constitutional Court during the initial phase of negotiations. It does, however, suggest that political discretion cannot be allowed to become a synonym for the absence of rules, the absence of reasons, and the absence of accountability.

More broadly, Strasbourg draws attention to a problem that Italian legislators have postponed for decades: the absence of a general law on religious freedom and the lack of a comprehensive legal framework governing the procedures through which intese are negotiated and approved. This gap reflects a distinctive feature of Italian legal history, deeply influenced by the unique position of the Catholic Church. Rome is not only the capital of the Italian Republic; it is also the center of worldwide Catholicism. That dual identity has inevitably shaped Italian church-state relations.

The judgment does not challenge that history. It does, however, suggest that a legal framework built around it may no longer be sufficient to guarantee effective equality among all religious communities. If Italy wishes to continue using the intesa system as its principal instrument for regulating relations with religious groups, it will need to make that system more transparent, more equal, and more legally accountable.

For this reason, the judgment is not only about Jehovah's Witnesses. It raises a broader question about the future of Italian church-state relations: to what extent can a system rooted in such a distinctive religious history continue to guarantee genuine equality among all communities of faith in contemporary democratic society?

Pierluigi Consorti