This is actually a serious hit for us ; this is rather blocking future development at all. Is this may be a known issue and there are some work-arounds?

Are you implying this is a regression and used to work in an earlier version of Hibernate Validator? Or you started directly off with 5.2.1.Final?

Can you post the full stack trace? Also, have you tried to isolate this problem from Spring? It would be much appreciated if you could provide a test case based on Bean Valdiation / Hibernate Validator only.