The European Court of Human Rights revisits a brutal assault on two Jehovah’s Witnesses evangelizing door to door—and teaches a lesson valid for all states.
by Massimo Introvigne
The story begins in March 2016, on an ordinary street in Chuguyiv, where Tamara Barsuk and Vira Gyl were doing what Jehovah’s Witnesses have done for generations: visiting homes, offering literature, and speaking with residents. Their routine ministry ended with both women unconscious on the ground. The attacker, identified immediately at the scene, punched, kicked, dragged, and beat them with such force that one suffered a fractured jaw and concussion, and the other lay dazed and injured. He threw their religious magazines on the ground and destroyed a hearing aid. Police arrived within minutes, and the man, referred to in the judgment as S., admitted he had assaulted them.
The case might have seemed straightforward. The attacker was present, the victims were hospitalized, and witnesses saw the aftermath. Yet the investigation soon drifted into a pattern the European Court has seen before. The indictment described the motive as a “sudden emergence of hostility,” a legal formula that domestic authorities have used repeatedly to avoid addressing allegations of religious bias. The women insisted from the outset that S. had said “I know you are Jehovah’s Witnesses” before the assault. A responding officer confirmed that one of them reported this at the scene. Several other Jehovah’s Witnesses testified that S. had berated and pushed them on earlier occasions, calling their religious organization a “cult’ and accusing them of spreading false propaganda—none of this persuaded investigators to consider religious hatred.
S. offered a different story. He claimed he had mistaken the women for fraudsters, drawing on television reports and anecdotes from Orthodox acquaintances. He acknowledged his hostility toward Jehovah’s Witnesses’ teachings but insisted that his actions had nothing to do with religion. The domestic courts accepted this version without explaining why it outweighed the applicants’ consistent account and the testimony of other Witnesses who described previous confrontations with him. The trial court convicted S. in 2016, but the conviction was quashed on appeal the following year. What followed was a carousel of retrials, reassignments, and repeated examinations of the same evidence. By March 2021 the five-year limitation period had expired, and the proceedings were discontinued. The prosecutor did not oppose the request to declare the case time-barred.
The European Court of Human Rights examined the case with the distance of time but with attention to the details that domestic authorities had overlooked. It reaffirmed that door-to-door preaching is a protected manifestation of religion under Article 9 of the Convention.
This is a key part of the judgment. Visiting homes to speak about one’s beliefs is treated as an expression of faith that falls squarely within the protection of Article 9. The judgement reaffirmed that “The Court has already held that Article 9 of the Convention applies to activities of this kind [door-to-door preaching], that is, imparting information about a particular set of beliefs to others who do not hold them (see Ossewaarde v. Russia, no. 27227/17, § 39, 7 March 2023, and Kokkinakis v. Greece, 25 May 1993, §§ 31 and 36, Series A no. 260-A)” (no. 68). Violence directed at individuals engaged in it obliges the State to examine whether prejudice played a role.
The Court stated that the State is under a “positive obligation” to conduct a “prompt and effective investigation capable of elucidating the possible hate motive beyond the attack” (no. 70) and that authorities must take reasonable steps “to unmask any religious motive” (no. 52). The Ukrainian authorities did not do so. They relied on a generic formula to describe the attacker’s state of mind, repeated it throughout the proceedings, and refused every request to reclassify the charges. The Court noted that it had already found a violation in a previous Ukrainian case involving the same formula, which suggested a recurring pattern rather than an isolated lapse.
The Court also treated the testimony of other Jehovah’s Witnesses as relevant evidence. Domestic courts had dismissed it as unrelated to the specific incident. Yet, the Strasbourg judges considered it part of a set of converging indicators that the authorities had failed to address. The attacker’s claim that he had mistaken the women for fraudsters did not relieve the State of its duty to investigate bias. The Court recalled that perpetrators may act with mixed motives, and that the authorities never explained why they preferred the defendant’s vague account to the applicants’ detailed one.
The judgment went further. It held that the protraction of the proceedings until they became time-barred was itself a violation. The case was simple: the attacker had admitted the assault, and the repeated restarts of the retrial had no serious justification. The Court observed that tolerance of such acts undermines public confidence in the rule of law. This finding stands independently of the motive dispute and applies even where evidence of bias is contested.
The Court unanimously found violations of Article 3 taken with Article 14 and Article 9 taken with Article 14. It awarded compensation for non-pecuniary damage and costs. The Committee of Ministers will supervise execution, and Ukraine will be expected to show that its authorities can investigate possible hate motives effectively and conclude proceedings before limitation periods expire.
The judgment arrives in a country facing immense challenges, yet its principles reach beyond Ukraine. It reiterates that door-to-door evangelism is a protected exercise of freedom of religion or belief. It affirms that States must investigate violence against believers engaged in protected religious activity, that generic formulas cannot replace genuine inquiry into motive, and that delay cannot be allowed to erase accountability.
It also signals that patterns of hostility toward religious minorities matter, even when expressed in words rather than blows. The Court’s reasoning will resonate in other cases involving attacks on religious minorities across the Council of Europe region.
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of Pennsylvania Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
