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Talk About: Law and Religion
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The webinar was hosted by the ICLRS Blog “Talk About: Law and Religion” and Orthodox Christianity Studies Center—Fordham University on October 29, 2024. Webinar panelists discussed political, legal, social, and theologicalaspects of Ukraine’s recent law No 3894 banning the Russian Orthodox Church and religious organizations affiliated with the ROC.
Sessions:
The law and the framework of decolonization (Jose Casanova / Catherine Wanner)
War as an exceptional situation for religious legislation (Elizabeth A. Clark / Marietta van der Tol)
The Ukrainian law banning the Russian Orthodox Church as a legal text (Dmytro Vovk / Maksym Vasin)
“Push to dialogue”: Can the law support interchurch relations? (Regina Elsner / Pavlo Smytsnyuk)
Bottom-up initiatives: What the impact has the law on grassroots dialogue initiatives (Tetiana Kalenychenko / Serhii Bortnyk)
Is the Ukrainian Orthodox Church a part of the Russian Orthodox Church? (Thomas Bremer / Nicholas Denysenko)
Our First Freedom: How Firm a Foundation
By Katrina Lantos Swett
At its core, religious freedom matters because it speaks to and honors that which makes humans utterly unique among all creation. We are the only inhabitants of this world who are uniquely hardwired to ask questions about the meaning of life: Who are we? Why are we here? What is our purpose? Where are we going? This unique and profound singularity of humans is the key to what gives meaning, purpose, and dignity to our lives. Socrates famously said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.”[1] Because this singular curiosity is so intrinsic to what it means to be human, protecting the quest to answer these questions and then, importantly, being allowed to live one’s life in accordance with the answers one receives truly is foundational to the whole human rights project. So many other fundamental rights flow from this wellspring right: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of association—the most basic parental rights that are protected in the Universal Declaration. All of these flow from this wellspring right of freedom of conscience and belief. So religious freedom is important, first and foremost, because it is intrinsic to our identity and our dignity as human beings.
On 4 October 2024, in the case of AH (C-608/22) & FN (C-609/22) v. Bundesamt für Fremdenwesen und Asyl, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) confirmed that gender and nationality may constitute sufficient criteria for an EU member state to grant asylum to a particular group of women. The applicants, Afghan nationals “AH” and “FN,” sought refugee status in Austria, citing the persecution of women under Afghanistan’s Taliban regime. Austria denied them refugee status, granting subsidiary protection instead, based on anticipated economic and social hardship if they were to return to Afghanistan. Austrian authorities expressed doubts regarding AH’s credibility and concluded that FN did not face a genuine risk of persecution.
Understanding Religious Freedom: Why Does It Matter?
By Nicholas Aroney
We live in a time when it is especially important to understand religious freedom and why it matters. There are places today where religious freedom is not regarded as a constitutional principle either because the official policy of the state is to enforce a form of secular atheism or because the official policy is to enforce a particular religion to the exclusion of all others.
There are also many places where the principle of religious freedom is acknowledged in principle but undermined in practice. In many such countries, there remain high levels of government or social discrimination on the basis of religion, including in the liberal democracies of the modern West, as Jonathan Fox has shown.
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