121), the Supreme Court of Canada found that Maurice Duplessis, the premier of Quebec, wrongfully caused the revocation of Frank Roncarelli's liquor license.
The Chief Prosecutor of the city, Oscar Gagnon, overwhelmed by the number of Witnesses being arrested and then released as a result of Roncarelli's intervention, contacted the Premier who spoke to Edouard Archambault, Chairman of the Quebec Liquor Commission.
Extensive testimony showed the government actors believed Roncarelli was disrupting the court system, causing civil disorder, and was therefore not entitled to the liquor license.
"In the end, religious groups are free to determine their membership and rules; courts will not intervene in such matters save where it is necessary to resolve an underlying legal dispute," Justice Malcolm Rowe wrote in the decision.
[9][better source needed] On June 30, 2011, the European Court of Human Rights found France to be guilty of violation of ECHR Article 9 (religious freedom) in regard to the 60% tax levied on all donations received from 1993 to 1996.
The Court found that the tax assessment represented a cut in the association's operating resources sufficient to interfere with the free exercise of its members' religion in practical terms.
[19][20] In 1998, The Watchtower reported that "On March 8, 1996, the Supreme Court of Japan [ruled that] ... Kobe Municipal Industrial Technical College violated the law by expelling Kunihito Kobayashi for his refusal to participate in martial arts training.
"[21][22] According to Awake!, "Misae Takeda, a Jehovah's Witness, was given [a] blood transfusion in 1992, while still under sedation following surgery to remove a malignant tumor of the liver."
[30] On April 20, 2017, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation ruled in favor of a claim from the Ministry of Justice to liquidate the Administrative Center of Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia.
[36][37] Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone once quipped, "I think the Jehovah's Witnesses ought to have an endowment in view of the aid which they give in solving the legal problems of civil liberties.
The Barnette decision overturned an earlier case, Minersville School District v. Gobitis (1940), in which the court had held that Witnesses could be forced against their will to pay homage to the flag.
In that case, Walter Chaplinsky, a Jehovah's Witness, had reportedly told a New Hampshire town marshal who was attempting to prevent him from preaching, "You are a God-damned racketeer" and "a damned fascist" and was arrested.
The court upheld the arrest, thus establishing that "insulting or 'fighting words', those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace" are among the "well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech [which] the prevention and punishment of...have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem."
The Court ruled in favor of Jehovah's Witnesses, holding that making it a misdemeanor to engage in door-to-door advocacy without first registering with the mayor and receiving a permit violates the First Amendment as it applies to religious proselytizing, anonymous political speech, and the distribution of handbills.