Religious Courts in the Jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights

Religious courts have for centuries been part of the European legal landscape. Almost all churches and religious communities have their own judicial systems, often composed of courts or tribunals ordered hierarchically. The aim of this paper is to present cases from the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, in which a religious court was involved at the stage of domestic proceedings. The twelve cases in question originate from a number of European States, from Italy to Finland and from the UK to Turkey—and in one particular case, Israel. The applicants belonged to many denominations, predominantly Christian. The Court of Human Rights (and before that, the Commission of Human Rights) has been concerned, in the main, with religious courts in terms of compliance with the requirement for a fair hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal under Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights. The Court has come to various conclusions—for example, it accepted that courts of the Church of England comply with the requirement, it questioned whether the cathedral chapter of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Finland did so, and it indirectly criticized proceedings before the Roman Rota of the Catholic Church. The most recent judgment from September 2017, Nagy v. Hungary, and in particular many associated dissenting opinions, demonstrate that the matter is worthy of study, particularly in the contemporary context of religious freedom. Nevertheless, the cases are so different that it is difficult to discern a coherent line of jurisprudence, and the Court itself hardly ever refers to its own previous judgments in this field.

Freedom of Religion and Its Regulation in Nigeria: Analysis of Preaching Board Laws in Some States of Northern Nigeria

The re-enactment of religious preaching board laws to regulate religious preaching in some states of Northern Nigeria generated debates between Government on the one hand and religious/human rights groups on the other. This research examines the Preaching Board Laws of Kano, Borno and Kaduna States in Northern Nigeria through the prism of the Nigerian Constitution and other democratic norms that relate to the right to freedom of religion in all democratic orders. It applies argumentative methodology to raise and analyse the following questions: how reasonable and justifiable are these religious preaching board laws in a democratic Nigeria?; what gave rise to the enactment of these laws in the states under study?; what judicial review mechanism would be employed to determine their reasonableness and justifiability in a democracy?; how do they accord with the freedom of religion clause in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria? The research establishes that some of the provisions of these laws are inconsistent with the provisions of the Nigerian Constitution and, by extension, international freedom of religion norms operating in all democratic orders. Second, Nigerian courts have not developed suitable balancing mechanisms for resolving conflicts between the right of the state to regulate and citizens’ right to freedom of religion otherwise called the two competing rights, in the light of which the research calls for the amendment of the laws to accord with the provisions of the Constitution and international freedom of religion norms acceptable in all democracies. The paper further recommends a harmonised proportionality test or judicial standard of review based on Nigeria’s religion-state relations and local experience for the use of courts, legislators and administrative agents coming face to face with this type of conflict in their official capacity.

Religion and Belief in United Kingdom Employment Law: An Introduction to the Case-Law

The interactions between religious belief and employment law touch on a wide variety of issues, ranging from basic questions about the definitions of ‘religion’ and ‘belief’—and, indeed, of ‘employment’—to issues such as time off for religious observance, religious dress in the workplace and the extent to which an employer can impose its religious values on its workforce. This monograph looks at the major issues of religion in relation to employment law in the United Kingdom, primarily by reference to the recent case-law.

The Juridification of Religion?

This article sets out to explore the extent to which developments currently taking place at the interface between law and religion in domestic, regional and international law can be conceptualized as instances of larger, multidimensional processes of juridification. We rely on an expansive notion of juridification, departing from the more narrow sense of juridificiation as the gradually increasing “colonization of the lifeworld” proposed by Jürgen Habermas in his Theory of Communicative Action (1987; Vol. 2, Beacon Press). More specifically, the article adapts the multidimensional notion of juridification outlined by Anders Molander and Lars Christian Blichner in their article ‘Mapping Juridification’ (2008; 14 European Law Journal 36), and develops it into a more context-specific notion of juridification that is attendant to the specific nature of religion as a subject matter for law.