Public Governance and Private Relationships: State Regulation and Religious Marriage in the UK


Michelle Flynn is an Irish barrister and a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany. She is currently a Visiting Researcher at Yale Law School in the United States.  Michelle is a 2019 alumna of the ICLRS Religion and the Rule of Law Young Scholars Fellowship Program.

In Attorney General v Akhter & ors [2020] EWCA Civ 122 the UK Court of Appeal overturned a judgment of the High Court which held that an Islamic marriage ceremony, a nikah, could have legal effect. There was a certain irony in the decision, which focused on the formal requirements of marriage law in England and Wales, being issued on St. Valentine’s Day; originally a Christian feast day, it has become a globally recognized day to celebrate love and romance. In modern times, marriage is generally regarded as intensely romantic, however the reality of the potential complications of marriage in our increasingly diverse and multicultural societies is frequently overlooked. (more…)

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COVID-19 Restrictions & (Re)Definition of Gender Roles in Nigeria


This post by Azizat Omotoyosi Amoloye-Adebayo is reprinted with acknowledgment of its original publication in the Blog of the Institute for African Women in Law.  Dr. Amoloye-Adebayo is a member of the Faculty of Law, University of Ilorin, Nigeria and a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court of Nigeria. She was a member of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies’ Young Scholars Fellowship on Religion and the Rule of Law class held at Christ Church, Oxford, UK, in 2019.  The views expressed in this entry belong solely to the author.

What happens when the “private” space becomes the “public” and ‘only’ professional space?

As of early February 2020, there was no reported case of Covid-19 infection in Nigeria. But by 21 April 2020, there were 665 reported cases and 22 deaths. On 17 April 2020, Nigeria recorded the death of the first high ranking government official, Alhaji Abba Kyari, the Chief of Staff to the Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari. By this time, the narrative of the contagion had changed from one of ‘contact with persons with travel history’ to that of community spread, at least within the cosmopolitan state of Lagos and the Federal Capital Territory Abuja. The testing procedure had to be stepped up from contact tracing to community testing which led to the discovery of more cases. (more…)

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Can We Reconcile the Freedom of Religion with the Right to Be Free from Gender Discrimination?

Dr. Eugenia Relaño Pastor is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Law and Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Germany)

Introduction

On the 25th Anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief took the opportunity to release his 2020 Annual Report, which shows his deep concern for worldwide gender-based violence against women, girls, and LGBT+ persons in the name of religion and belief. In the report he reinforces his predecessors’ endeavors to reject any legitimate religious “justification” for violence or discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

As a result, he produced an excellent preliminary report for a future UN general comment on the intersection between the right to freedom of religion or belief and the right to equality and non-discrimination on the basis of gender, but he failed to identify the core issues at stake for dealing with rights grounded on two moral truths: freedom and equality. That omission is the proverbial elephant in the room. In my experience as an activist (I have worked as a legal adviser for migration and equality with the Spanish Ombudsman, and I deal with daily legal complaints against the administration) and legal scholar committed to liberty and equality rights for women and the LGBT+ community, as well as to religious freedom for all, the only choice is to balance both rights carefully through a context-sensitive approach and to try to find negotiated compromises when tension arises. (more…)

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