Journal of Law, Religion and State - 1, Feb 2019

The article provides data that attest to the severity of the European demographic, economic, and political decline, and considers one of its manifestations, the capacity of the secular state to cope with the transformations of the European religious landscape. The secular state has been a European invention, and the decline of Europe has inevitable repercussions for its vitality, in Europe and beyond. In Europe, the weakness of the secular state has been revealed by the diversification of the European religious landscape. A declining Europe is less and less capable of managing diversity using the tools provided by the secular state. Analysis of the different models of secular states implemented in Europe is followed by a reexamination of the issue of the decline of Europe, and of its effect on the reforms that are required to adapt the secular state to the new conditions.

This article focuses on state-church relations and on the peculiar implementation of the “idea of secularism” in Italy. First, it explores the formal provisions of the 1848 Constitution. Next, it investigates constitutional provisions that came into force in 1948. Finally, it examines how the actors of the living constitution (legislators, the government, judges, and the Constitutional Court in particular) tried to balance and develop the potentially conflicting principles included in the 1948 Constitution in the area of religious freedom, equality, and state-church relations. The article explores three particularly controversial examples: the teaching of religion in state schools; the display of the crucifix in classrooms; and state funding mechanisms of religious denominations. The main claim of the article is that, with regard to the regulation of religion in Italy, the transformation of the constitutional position of religion did not occur within the formal constitution, but in the “living constitution.”

International human rights law (ihrl) has traditionally enjoyed an uneasy relationship with customary, religious, and indigenous forms of law. International courts and tribunals have considered these non-state forms of law to represent both structural and material challenges to the implementation of human rights norms at the domestic level. Over the course of the last decades, however, the theory and practice of human rights has increasingly started recognizing and accommodating multiple legal orders. This article traces the gradually increasing accommodation of legal pluralism in ihrl in the monitoring practice of four un human rights committees over a period of 20 years, looking in particular at the increasing recognition of religious forms of legality across the committees.

Article 20(2) of the un’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (iccpr) is an odd human rights clause. It provides that “[a]ny advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.” Accordingly, this provision does not appear to codify a fundamental right but rather a sui generis state obligation. The present article aims at providing a legal taxonomy of this international incitement clause, ultimately also answering the question as to whether, despite its unique formulation as speech prohibition, it contains a justiciable right to protection from incitement.

This article compares the law and religion jurisprudence of the us Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights across three legal areas: religious symbols and religion-state relations, individual religious freedom, and institutional religious freedom or freedom of the church. Particular focus is given to the manner in which this jurisprudence reveals the underlying structure and meaning of the secular. Although there continues to be significant jurisprudential diversity between these two courts and across these legal areas, there is also emerging a shared accounting of religion, secularity, and moral order in the late modern West.