This past July, the Center co-hosted a conference in Rome, “Liberalism’s Limits: Religious Exemptions and Hate Speech.” The conference, which addressed the challenges that religious exemptions and hate-speech regulations pose for liberalism, was divided into three workshops, for which participants submitted short reflection papers. Professor Angelo Rinella (LUMSA) submitted the following paper for Workshop 2, on religious exemptions, which we are delighted to publish here:

Migration flows, whether for humanitarian or economic reasons, have profoundly changed the face of today’s European societies. Groups of different ethnic, cultural, and religious origins have been added to the communities originally settled in the territories of states. These newcomers are required to observe the existing rules to ensure peaceful coexistence and to comply with the established order. At the same time, the Constitutions of liberal and democratic states guarantee that minorities and individuals who are “different”—by social, economic, religious, and political condition—do not suffer any discrimination because of their diversity. In this context, some communities with a religion extraneous to the European religious tradition, such as Islamic communities, ask to regulate some of the affairs of their personal lives according to religious rules, as an alternative to the state civil law.

This demand for recognition of their own identity persists even in the face of state inertia. It produces the de facto formation of regulatory micro-systems that have in their effectiveness their legitimation principle. Micro-systems of norms that coexist in the same territory of the state and apply to certain groups of individuals settled in the same space of the state. Individuals who choose to regulate certain aspects of their existence according to different and alternative rules with respect to the state rules. In other words, the State loses the monopoly of the production of the rules in the State territory.

Anthropologists define this phenomenon in terms of ‘legal pluralism.’ For us, legal scholars, the scenario painted poses a number of problems and questions.

My opinion is that in front of such a scenario, rejecting or denying the problem would be the most detrimental and, all in all, inconsistent with the democratic, liberal, and social spirit of European constitutions.

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