July 17, 2024
By Saïla Ouald-Chaib “Les droits de l’homme n’existent pas. Ce sont les droits de l’homme blanc” These are the words of a young French Muslim girl whom I met when I was still in law school. She spoke those words when she learned I was studying human rights law. Her words stuck with me during […]
May 24, 2024
by Thibaut Lesseliers In the case of Föderation der Aleviten Gemeinden in Österreich, the European Court of Human Rights (‘ECtHR’, ‘the Court’) ruled on the Article 9 (freedom of religion) and Article 6 § 1 (reasonable time aspect of right to fair trial) complaints brought by an Alevi cultural association following the refusal of the […]
May 04, 2023
By Betül Durmuş On 9 March 2023, the First Section of the European Court of Human Rights (‘the Court’) delivered its decision on a promising case on religious upbringing – Cupiał v Poland – which concerns the criminal conviction of a religious parent for psychological abuse of his children. Although the case carried a great […]
October 28, 2022
By Cathérine Van de Graaf On the 12th of September, the Human Rights Centre[1] (HRC) of Ghent University (Belgium) submitted a third party intervention (TPI) before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR or the Court) in the communicated case of Missaoui and Akhandaf v. Belgium, after being granted leave to intervene by the President […]
October 21, 2022
by Tommaso Virgili In the case Rabczewska v. Poland, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) held that the conviction of a Polish woman due to her blasphemous statements against the Bible violated her rights under Article 10 of the Convention. This case stands in contrast with the recent E.S. v. Austria, where the Court […]
September 27, 2022
By Natalie Alkiviadou Salman Rushdie Internationally acclaimed, Indian-born writer Salman Rushdie has written a range of novels and stories on social, historical and philosophical issues. He is a controversial figure mostly because of his fourth novel, ‘The Satanic Verses’. The book was published in 1988 and was heavily criticised by some Muslim leaders as blasphemous, […]
September 23, 2022
By Simona Florescu In T.C. v Italy, the ECtHR was once again called upon to decide on sensitive questions involving divergent parental views over the child’s upbringing. In this particular case, the main question was whether the Italian courts’ judgments ordering the applicant to refrain from actively involving his daughter in religious activities constituted discrimination […]
June 14, 2022
By Cathérine Van de Graaf Anderlecht Christian Assembly of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Others v. Belgium is one of these judgments where you are reading the reasoning of the European Court of Human Rights (hereinafter: Court or ECtHR) and you think you know the direction it is going, but it then takes a turn that nobody […]
December 14, 2021
By Naoual El Yattouti In the case Polat v. Austria, the mother of a deceased child complained that the carrying out of a post-mortem despite her and her husband’s objections based on religious reasons, violated her rights under Articles 8, 9 and 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights (hereafter: the Convention). The European […]
September 01, 2021
Cathérine Van de Graaf is a research fellow at the Academy for European Human Rights Protection (University of Cologne) and affiliated researcher at the Human Rights Centre (Ghent University). The Human Rights Centre of Ghent University (Belgium) submitted a joint third party intervention (TPI) before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR or the Court) […]
December 10, 2020
By Inez van Soolingen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) In the case of Perovy v. Russia, Ms. Perova and Mr. Perov complained that a rite of blessing in their son’s classroom, carried out by a priest of a different belief than their own, violated their rights under Article 2 of Protocol No. 1 (hereafter: the Protocol) and […]
April 06, 2020
This blogpost was written by Niklas Barke, PhD Candidate, Institute for Human Rights, Åbo Akademi University On the 11th of March, the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) issued its decisions in Grimmark v. Sweden and Steen v. Sweden, two cases casting light on the issue of refusal by healthcare professionals to participate in […]
November 27, 2019
Effie Fokas is a political scientist and a Senior Research Fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy, Research Associate of the London School of Economics Hellenic Observatory, and member of the Henry Luce/Leadership 100 project on Orthodoxy and Human Rights (Orthodox Christian Studies Center, Fordham University). She was also Principal Investigator of […]
November 23, 2018
By Julie Ringelheim, researcher with the FRS-FNRS and Professor at Louvain University. In Lachiri v. Belgium, decided on 18 September 2018, the European Court of Human Rights held that excluding a woman from the courtroom, who was a civil party to the case, on the ground that she wore an ‘Islamic headscarf’ (hijab) amounted to […]
December 11, 2017
In Hamidović v Bosnia and Herzegovina (5 December 2017), the Fourth Section of the Court found a violation of articles 9 and 14 ECHR on account of the punishment of a witness for wearing an Islamic skullcap in the courtroom. As almost all claims for accommodation of Islamic religious practice have failed before the Court, […]
July 25, 2017
By Marcella Ferri, Adjunct Professor of International Human Rights Law – ASERI, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan (Italy), and Adjunct Professor of Institutions of Comparative and European Law – module of European Law – University of Bergamo, Bergamo (Italy) On 11 July 2017, the European Court of Human Rights delivered two similar judgments in the Belkacemi and Oussar […]
March 30, 2017
By Fabienne Bretscher, PhD Student at the University of Zurich, Visiting Researcher at the Erasmus School of Law Rotterdam In a recent judgment, the ECtHR found that the refusal to grant Muslim students exemption from mandatory swimming classes in Swiss public schools did not amount to a violation of the right to freedom of religion […]
March 27, 2017
By Saïla Ouald-Chaib and Valeska David On 14 March 2017, the European Court of Justice issued two judgments, in the cases of Achbita and Bougnaoui concerning the manifestation of beliefs in the private workplace. From the perspective of inclusion and human rights law, the judgments are very disappointing. They basically legitimize and even provide a […]
September 20, 2016
By Saïla Ouald Chaib The day the opinion of Advocate General Kokott in the case of Achbita v. G4S came out, my phone did not stop ringing. The press wanted to know if this opinion really meant that employers could refuse to hire women wearing a hijab. The fact that even journalists sounded surprised speaks […]
September 16, 2016
By Eva Brems What is at Stake? The Hijab Wearer as an Outlaw The corporate anti-headscarf policy that is challenged in the Achbita case has to be situated in the context of a country that has seen headscarf bans expand like an oil stain from one sector to the next. This results in a situation […]