Published on 11 March 2024
FIFTH SECTION
Application no. 42789/23
SUPREME RELIGIOUS ADMINISTRATION OF MUSLIMS OF ALL GEORGIA
against Georgia
lodged on 30 November 2023
communicated on 20 February 2024
SUBJECT MATTER OF THE CASE
The application concerns under Article 1 of Protocol No. 12 a differential treatment of two religious organisations, one of them forming part of the Apostolic Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Georgia (hereinafter “the Orthodox Church”) and the other representing the Muslim community living in the country.
On 19 February 2020 the applicant association, which is an independent religious centre uniting various religious institutions of Muslims living in Georgia, brought a court action against the Marneuli City Council, complaining that there was a pattern of that local authority distributing the relevant annual State subsidies exclusively to the Marneuli Diocese, which was a regional division of the Orthodox Church, without splitting anything with any of the Muslim religious institutions present in the Marneuli District. The applicant thus requested that the fact of discriminatory treatment be confirmed by a court.
Initially, on 1 July 2022 the Bolnisi District Court allowed the applicant association’s action in full, ruling that the contested differential treatment was void of any reasonable justification and thus constituted a discrimination. However, the Tbilisi Court of Appeals overturned the lower court’s decision on 8 December 2022, stating that the difference in the treatment was justified in the light of the special role of the Orthodox Church in the history of the country, which was also acknowledged in the Constitution of Georgia and a special constitutional agreement laid between the State and the Orthodox Church.
According to the applicant association, one of the judges of the Tbilisi Court of Appel made discriminatory comments during the examination of the case, which prompted the applicant to lodge, on 13 February 2023, a disciplinary complaint against that judge with the High Council of Justice of Georgia. The examination of this disciplinary complaint is currently ongoing.
By a decision of 7 June 2023, which was served on the applicant association on 31 July 2023, the Supreme Court, dismissing the applicant’s appeal on points of law as ill-founded and fully upholding the merits of the appellate judgment of 8 December 2022, finally terminated the proceedings.
Citing Article 1 of Protocol No. 12, the applicant association complained that the differential treatment in the allocation of the relevant State funding between the Muslim and Christian religious organisations constituted a discriminatory treatment.
QUESTION TO THE PARTIES
Having regard to the need to subject differential treatment in allocation of State subsidies to various religious communities to “the strictest scrutiny” (see, mutatis mutandis, Magyar Keresztény Mennonita Egyház and Others v. Hungary, nos. 70945/11 and 8 others, § 106, ECHR 2014 (extracts)), can the applicant association be said to have suffered discrimination in the enjoyment of its rights set by law, contrary to Article 1 of Protocol no. 12?
- In particular, did religious communities have a right under domestic law to receive State subsidies or was the allocation of those subsidies a matter of exercise of a discretionary public power? Was the applicant association in an analogous or relevantly similar situation when compared with the Georgian Orthodox Church? Was the applicant association subjected to a difference in treatment in the allocation of the relevant State subsidies at the local level of the Marneuli District? If so, did that difference in treatment pursue a legitimate aim, and did it have a reasonable justification (see, for an overview of the relevant general principles, Ádám and Others v. Romania, nos. 81114/17 and 5 others, §§ 82-90, 13 October 2020)?