Your Name Is Religion: Public Authorities’ Assessment of Faith Groups in the Spanish Registration System

alberto

Alberto Jose Ferrari Puerta is a lecturer at the Department of International Law, Ecclesiastical Law and Philosophy of Law, Complutense University of Madrid Law School.

Many national legal systems provide for the existence of an official registry for the recognition of religious denominations. In Spain, the Register of Religious Entities was introduced by the Organic Law on Religious Freedom of 1980. This law gave substantive development to the fundamental right enshrined in Article 16 of the 1978 Spanish Constitution, which reestablished religious freedom after nearly 40 years of its suppression under the Franco dictatorship. Article 5 of the Organic Law explicitly provides that religious denominations acquire legal personality upon registration in the Register.

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Restricting Religious Names: Three Recent Cases

Dmytro Vovk is a visiting associate professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

The name of a religious group is usually considered an aspect of its autonomy. The name can be based on religious history and theology and serve as the group’s self-representation to its members, the public, and the state. Other posts in this blog series discuss how, from the perspective of freedom of religion or belief (FoRB), a religiously neutral state can interfere in naming for non-religious reasons, such as protection of intellectual rights, prohibition of morally inappropriate or pejorative names, or prior use of the names by other religious organizations. These restrictions apply similarly to religious organizations and to NGOs, political parties, and even business corporations alike.

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