ECHR ordered Bulgaria to allow Jehovah's Witnesses to go door-to-door

The ECHR ruled that the ban on 'door-to-door' preaching is undemocratic. Photo: JW.ORG

The Strasbourg court concluded that municipal bans on religious conversations "door-to-door" do not meet the requirements of a democratic society and are excessive. This was reported by the "Legal and Judicial Gazette."

The case arose from a regulation introduced by the municipal council of the city of Shumen back in 2016. At that time, officials banned any "religious propaganda" in citizens' homes, justifying this by complaints about visits from Jehovah's Witnesses representatives.

The authorities indicated that the missionaries intrusively offered literature and engaged in conversations on spiritual topics, for which a system of administrative fines was established.

Representatives of the organization and two of its members challenged these restrictions in Bulgaria's national courts. Although in 2017 the Shumen city court found the ban unlawful, Bulgaria's Supreme Administrative Court overturned that decision in 2021. The Bulgarian judges considered that the protection of private life and the inviolability of the home outweighed the right to preach.

However, the Strasbourg judges recalled that freedom of religion explicitly includes the right to peacefully spread one's beliefs and to attempt to convince others through preaching and teaching. The ECHR emphasized that the ban in Shumen was formulated too broadly: it covered all forms of religious communication, drawing no distinction between coercion and peaceful conversation.

At the same time, the Bulgarian authorities provided no evidence that the organization's activities had led to systematic public order violations.

The court, in its ruling, separately noted that mere contact with religious views that a person does not share cannot serve as grounds for banning a mission. Thus, Strasbourg effectively confirmed the inadmissibility of discriminatory restrictions that applied exclusively to believers, while political campaigning or commercial solicitation in the city remained permitted.

As reported by SPZh, the Estonian Church may apply to the ECHR over an anti-church law.

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