Portuguese Colonization, Catholic Faith, and the Relativization of Secularism in the Jurisprudence of Brazil’s Supreme Court

Ana Cristina Melo de Pontes Botelho is a research professor at the Center for Comparative Constitutional Studies and a collaborating professor at the University of Brasília.

The Role of Portuguese Catholic Colonization in the Emergence of the Brazilian Nation

With the Portuguese colonization of Brazil, Franciscan priests and members of other religious orders were sent to catechize the indigenous inhabitants of the region. The Portuguese brought with them the culture of the June festivals dedicated to various saints, including Saint John, Saint Peter, and Saint Anthony of Padua, a Portuguese Catholic priest and friar of the Franciscan Order, who died on 13 June 1231.

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Communist Law and the Protection of Religious Freedom in Poland

Piotr Szymaniec is a professor at and the director of the Institute of Socio-Legal Studies, Angelus Silesius University of Applied Sciences, in Wałbrzych (Poland).

For 123 years, between 1795 and 1918, maps of Europe contained no independent Polish state. In the second half of the nineteenth century, former Polish lands were subject to quasi-colonial policy (with the exception of Galicia, which gained autonomy within Austria-Hungary). This policy was reflected in enforceable law; legal orders of all states ruling Polish lands defined crimes against religion, the most serious of which was blasphemy. The Austrian Criminal Code of May 27, 1852; the German Code of May 31, 1870; and the Russian Code of 1903 all introduced the crime of blasphemy.

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Spiritual Decolonization, National Security, and Religious Freedom: Squaring a Triangle in the Case of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church

Andriy Fert is a UNET non-resident fellow at Zentrum für Osteuropa- und internationale Studien in Berlin.

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

In June 2023, the fashionable Ukrainian multimedia cultural project Ukraїner published an article on decolonization. Decolonization, as the author describes it, is “a process of cleansing the public space from the markers of (Russian) occupation,” including monuments, mosaics, names of streets, and public premises associated with the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia.

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