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Sandberg on Religious Freedom and Discrimination in the UK

Russell Sandberg (Cardiff Law School) has posted The Right to Discriminate. The abstract follows. –JKH

The first decade of the 21st century has witnessed a number of controversies surrounding the interaction between law and religion in the United Kingdom. In particular, tensions have emerged between laws protecting religious freedom and those which prohibit discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. In particular, Parliament has repeatedly examined the scope and ambit of exceptions afforded to religious groups which allow them to discriminate on grounds of sexual orientation when specific conditions are met.  And these exceptions have reportedly led to tensions within both the Blair and Brown cabinets and rebukes from the Vatican and the European Commission, criticising the exceptions for being too narrow and too broad respectively. The exceptions have also been challenged by way of judicial review, have been applied or commented upon in a number of high-profile cases and have attracted comment in the print and broadcast media. A number of employees have brought claims asserting that new legal requirements promoting equality on grounds of sexual orientation are incompatible with their religious beliefs. This article seeks to explore the legal changes that have occurred in the first decade of the 21st century affecting religion and sexual orientation with particular reference to how courts and tribunals have dealt with clashes between the two. It discusses the extent to which English law allows religious groups and individuals to follow their own beliefs regarding human sexuality.

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CLR to Co-host Talk by Secretary General of the International Movement of Catholic Studies

CLR will co-host a talk by Christopher Derige Malano, Secretary General of the International Movement of Catholic Studies – Pax Romana (IMCS), at St. John’s Law School on Tuesday, September 27, 2011.  IMCS is a UN-accredited NGO concerned with human rights, the eradication of poverty, the empowerment of women, and much more. Mr. Malano will discuss his experiences working at ICMS and the UN.  All students are encouraged to attend, particularly those with an interest in careers in international or public interest law. The event, co-hosted with the Center for International and Comparative Law, will be held in the Mattone Family Atrium from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Moyn’s “The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History”

International human rights is a conspicuous idea in legal discourse today; one can even take specific courses devoted to the subject.  Talk about international human rights has always seemed to me to fit at best imperfectly within our own constitutional framework for thinking about legal rights.  And legal scholar Michael Perry (Emory) has done important work over the years tracing the idea of human rights to a distinctly religious source and foundation (see, for example, his Toward a Theory of Human Rights: Religion, Law, Courts (CUP 2006)).

In The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (HUP 2010), Samuel Moyn (Columbia) offers a critical and cautionary perspective on the idea of human rights.  The first couple of chapters of the book may be particularly interesting for CLR Forum readers, but the whole thing is well worth considering.  The publisher’s description follows.  — MOD

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future.

For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront.

It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Hauling the Pope before the International Criminal Court

Yesterday, the Center for Constitutional Rights requested that the International Criminal Court, a tribunal headquartered in The Hague, prosecute the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI, and three cardinals for “crimes against humanity” in connection with the clergy sex-abuse scandal.  The complaint alleges that the Vatican tolerated the systematic and widespread rape and torture of children and vulnerable adults throughout the world and that Pope Benedict XVI and three cardinals bear personal responsibility for these crimes as a matter of direct authority and respondeat superior.

There are serious legal problems with CCR’s complaint.  First, sexual abuse by clergy does not fit easily within the definition of a “crime against humanity” contained in the ICC’s founding treaty, the Rome Statute of 2002.  The Rome Statute defines a “crime against humanity” as “a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population,” a definition that suggests something like a wartime atrocity.  Second, the Vatican is not a state-party to the Rome Treaty.  That’s not necessarily a show-stopper, as the ICC has jurisdiction over crimes Read more

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Doe’s “Law and Religion in Europe”

This book, Law and Religion in Europe: A Comparative Introduction, by Norman Doe (Cardiff — see our Links page for the Centre for Law and Religion there) (OUP 2011), will be of deep and immediate interest to students of international and comparative law and religion.  I’m excited to get my copy of this important book.  The publisher’s description follows.  — MOD

Each state in Europe has its own national laws which affect religion and these are increasingly the subject of political and academic debate. This book provides a detailed comparative introduction to these laws with particular reference to the states of the European Union. A comparison of national laws on religion reveals profound similarities between them. From these emerge principles of law on religion common to the states of Europe and the book articulates these for the first time. It examines the constitutional postures of states towards religion, religious freedom, and discrimination, and the legal position, autonomy, and ministers of religious organizations. It also examines the protection of doctrine and worship, the property and finances of religion, religion, education, and public institutions, and religion, marriage, and children, as well as the fundamentals of the emergent European Union law on religion.

The existence of these principles challenges the standard view in modern scholarship that there is little commonality in the legal postures of European states towards religion – it reveals that the dominant juridical model in Europe is that of cooperation between State and religion. The book also analyses national laws in the context of international laws on religion, particularly the European Convention on Human Rights. It proposes that national laws go further than these in their treatment and protection of religion, and that the principles of religion law common to the states of Europe may themselves represent a blueprint for the development of international norms in this field. The book provides a wealth of legal materials for scholars and students. The principles articulated in it also enable greater dialogue between law and disciplines beyond law, such as the sociology of religion, about the role of religion in Europe today. The book also identifies areas for further research in this regard, pointing the direction for future study.