Ponownie o sprzeciwie sumienia

In 2011, the European Court of Human Rights, sitting as the Grand Chamber, delivered a well-known judgment in the case of Bayatyan v Armenia, deciding in favour of the applicant who had refused to comply with his military service for conscience reasons. In my reply to Jacek Falski, whose paper was published earlier this year in “Państwo i Prawo”, I argue that the ruling concerned exclusively the conscientious objection to military service and it should not be interpreted as affording legal protection to individuals who face other types of moral conflicts preventing them from fulfilling their legal duties. Although the reasoning of the Court seems potentially applicable to cases of that kind, it is not by accident that the judgment clearly avoids any such reference. The grounds for accepting conscientious objection as a legally protected manifestation of freedom of religion or belief could be possibly traced in the Grand Chamber ruling in the case of Eweida and others v United Kingdom (2013). However, the criteria set by the Court in that judgment suggest that instead of ‘discovering’ conscientious objection as yet another manifestation of freedom of religion or belief, the Court struggles to integrate the recognition of this phenomenon with its earlier case-law. This can be achieved by offering a more extensive interpretation of ‘practice’ within the meaning of Article 9 of the Convention.