NGOs under European Convention on Human Rights / Tymofeyeva

in such a situation is not to remove the cause of tension by eliminating pluralism, but to ensure that the competing groups tolerate each other. The judgment confirmed the doctrine of autonomy of religious communities. 783 The interference with the running of religious groups may also take place in the form of complete dissolution of these subjects. The applicant in the case of Biblical Centre of the Chuvash Republic v. Russia 784 was a Pentecostal mission that registered as a religious organisation in 1991. Furthermore, it founded a Biblical college and Sunday school. In October 2007, it was dissolved by order of the Russian Supreme Court on the grounds that it had performed educational activities without authorisation and breached hygiene and sanitary rules. The Court noted that the applicant’s dissolution amounted to an interference with its rights to freedom of religion under Article 9 of the Convention. While the Court did find that the state had acted in accordance with law and pursued the legitimate aims of protecting health and the rights of others by putting an end to unlicensed education in inadequate conditions, as a result of the Russian courts’ decisions, the applicant had nonetheless ceased to exist as a registered religious organisation. Consequently, its members were deprived of the right to manifest their religion in community with others and to engage in the activities indispensable to their religious practice. This amounted to a breach of Article 9 of the Convention. 2.5.3 Payment of taxes A number of cases in which Article 34 NGO applicants complained of violations of Article 9 of the Convention concerned tax payments. The case of Association Les Témoins de Jéhovah v. France 785 related to a supplementary tax demand for several dozen million euros, claimed from the association ‘Les Témoins de Jéhovah’ (Association of Jehovah’s Witnesses). As the most religious movements, the applicant association was financed by donations. In 1995, tax audit authorities conducted a control of the applicant’s finances and required that the association had to declare the gifts that it had received for the last three years. This tax assessment resulted in the association owing the equivalent of approximately 45 million euros. The applicant association was not successful in any of its appeals. According to the association, the procedure in question had been defective and had infringed its freedom of religion. The Court found a violation of Article 9, holding in particular that the relevant provisions of the tax code under which the gifts to the association, Les Témoins de Jéhovah, were automatically taxed had not been sufficiently foreseeable. The initial legislation concerned only natural persons and only the French Court of Cassation had interpreted the tax code as applying to legal entities. Such an interpretation of the disputed provision by the courts would have been difficult for the applicant association to foresee, in that manual gifts had until then been exempt from any declaration requirement and had not been systematically subjected to duty on transfers without 783 DURHAM, W. Islam, Europe and Emerging Legal Issues . Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2012, p. 26. 784 Biblical Centre of the Chuvash Republic, cited above. 785 Association Les Témoins de Jéhovah, cited above.

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