Two Concepts of Religious Freedom in the European Court of Human Rights

Abstract

This paper considers the way in which recent historical work on the history of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience opens up a new interpretation of the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights in the headscarf cases. These decisions have been widely criticized as adopting a militantly secularist approach to the presence of Islamic religious symbols in the public sphere, an approach that seems inconsistent or even overtly discriminatory in light of the court's recent decision in Lautsi that the compulsory display of crucifixes in the classroom did not breach Italy's convention obligations. I argue that the headscarf cases turn less on the balance between state neutrality and religious belief, than on an understanding of certain religious symbols as a threat to public order and as harbingers of sectarian strife which undermine democracy.

The educational competence of the European Court of Human Rights: judicial pedagogies of religious symbols in classrooms

“…Jiménez Lobeira, 2014;Movsesian, 2012;Poulter, 1997), and can be considered philosophically as issues of freedom of conscience (e.g. Benhabib, 2010;Bhuta, 2014), or sociologically, though the lens of secularisation theory (Arthur, 2008;Arthur & Holdsworth, 2012). In Perry-Hazan's typology, these approaches raise both ex-post questions of competence, but also relate to the ex-ante question of the ECtHR's supra-national position (Spano, 2018), particularly since the court's role is to uphold human rights and not to argue for or against any particular constitutional position, as secular or neutral.…”

A construção da liberdade religiosa em Portugal: do trilho legal à percepção da liberdade religiosa entre as lideranças evangélicas

“…Com efeito, sobretudo com o tratado e a paz de Vestfália (1648) e com a consequente emancipação dos Estados-nação face ao escrutínio religioso, o discurso político adota a ideia de tolerância ou neutralidade relativamente à religião (Dunn, 1996). Pela necessidade de o Estado regular e mediar o conflito político-religioso e assegurar a contenção das ameaças à ordem política legítima, emerge uma suspensão, por meio do direito público, das questões irresolúveis relativas à verdade religiosa, concedendo-se, para tal, reconhecimento jurídico e equidade às diferentes confissões (Bhuta, 2012).…”

“…Estas conceções sobre liberdade de consciência e, por consequência, de religião seriam aprofundadas no século XIX, em particular com as ideias kantianas sobre o rechsstaat. Esta doutrina, traduzida como Estado de direito ou Estado constitucional, defendia que o poder estatal deve ser redefinido e limitado pela lei e, entre outros aspectos importantes, estar em consonância com a ideia de que existe uma esfera de liberdade individual que é inviolável e que o Estado não pode penetrar (Schmitt, 2007(Schmitt, [1928; Bhuta, 2012):…”

Divine Text, National Language, and Their Publics: Arguing an Indonesian Qur'an

“…Rather, in this view, religion is a crucial factor in what motivates and directs the impact people have upon one another. For reasons like this, freedom to manifest religion—even in those European states that have emphasized the principle—has always been limited on the grounds that neutrality toward religion is merely an exception to the state's prior responsibility for public order (Bhuta 2014). But in either case, whether one emphasizes religion-as-belief or religion-as-morality, what makes religious freedom a special case, requiring special protections, institutions, and interventions, is predicated on what one takes religion ultimately to be.…”