Estonia¶
The Estonian cases show a security threat answered by regulating a church’s ties abroad, and the state’s institutions disagreeing over how far that may go. The legislature wrote the measure, the presidency resisted it and the court accepted it on a narrow reading, so the safeguard ended up in interpretation rather than in the text. Its reach depends on how the word ‘threat’ is read.
The clerk’s briefs¶
From the clerks, for the Patrician’s eyes
Not urgent. Parishioners of the affected church find a question about their church’s leadership turned into a question about their own loyalty, and its clergy must rewrite their ties against a deadline. Other faiths with leadership abroad learn that the state may examine theirs. If the narrow reading holds, little changes beyond paperwork; a later government with a broader idea of danger could read the word more widely without amending a line, and a neighbour able to make an innocent tie look dangerous could prompt it to.
June 2026: The court reads it narrowly¶
On 8 June 2026 Estonia’s Supreme Court, by 11 votes to 6, found the amendments to the Churches and Congregations Act constitutional, holding, as the Civicus Monitor summarises it, that restrictions apply only where a foreign affiliation “presents a genuine and concrete threat” to “Estonia’s security, constitutional order or public order”, and that dissolution “could only be used as a last resort”. The amendments target the ties of the Orthodox Church of Estonia to the Moscow Patriarchate, and President Alar Karis had twice refused to sign them. The interior ministry’s own account of the ruling quotes the minister, Igor Taro: “Looking back, it is clear that the President of the Republic was right to refuse to sign the law.” It adds that “the state does not want to close any church buildings or monasteries”, that the transition period is six months, and that only a court can dissolve a religious association. The clerks note that the German lodges cut their foreign ties hoping to survive, and that here the state has made the cutting a legal requirement.
October 2025: The president asks the court¶
On 3 July 2025 the President again declined to promulgate the amended law. On 17 September the Riigikogu passed it without changes, and on 3 October President Alar Karis asked the Supreme Court to declare it unconstitutional, as the Estonian government told the UN. The clerks note that a law the president twice refused to sign is now with the court, and that the court will say how wide the law’s word “threat” reaches.
June 2025: Passed again¶
On 18 June 2025 the Riigikogu passed, by 68 votes to 17, a second version of the amendments to the Churches and Congregations Act; the first, passed on 9 April, the President had refused to promulgate on 24 April. A church may not be linked by its statutes, founding documents or economically to a foreign spiritual centre or leader that threatens Estonia’s security or its constitutional or public order. The wording on being guided by a person of influence abroad was dropped, and the transition period went from two months to six. The clerks note that the law requires a church to cut a tie abroad, and leaves it to the state to say which ties count as a threat.