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On 1 July 2026, Ireland took over from Cyprus the six-monthly rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union, convening and presiding over the governments of the 27 EU member states until the end of 2026. On 7 July, Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Micheál Martin, presented his government’s legislative program to the plenary of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, under three broad themes indicative of the current challenges facing the Union in an increasingly volatile geo-political context: competitiveness, security, and values. Two days later Prime Minister Martin met at Government Buildings in Dublin to discuss this program with representatives of Europe’s main Christian churches. After the meeting, Martin stated, “Our churches and faith communities play a unique role in European society—socially, culturally and spiritually.”
In Rubinstein v. The Minister of Defense (1998) and several subsequent cases, the Israeli Supreme Court invalidated executive branch administrative acts and Knesset laws granting exemptions from military service for ultra-Orthodox Jewish Yeshiva students. In its reasoning, the Supreme Court mainly referred to separation-of-power and equality issues. While he initially supported some of these decisions, Gideon Sapir (Bar-Ilan University) eventually changed his opinion for several reasons explained in this video.
In Leyla Şahin v. Turkey (2004), the European Court of Human Rights sided with the Turkish government in prohibiting a medical student to wear the hijab on public university property. Michel Rosenfeld (Benjamine N. Cardozo School of Law) explains why he changed his opinion regarding the Court’s Leyla Şahin judgment and why he believes that, had it been decided in 2026, the case would have required a different approach.
A Quite Architecture of Religious Freedom at Work
By Fábio Ferreira Nascimento
A few years ago, if someone had suggested that multinational corporations would become important laboratories for religious freedom, many scholars of law and religion would have been skeptical. After all, corporations are not churches. They are not courts. They are not the democratic or civil society institutions we usually associate with protecting freedom of religion or belief (FoRB). And yet that is precisely where some of the most interesting FoRB-related developments are taking place today. In the article “Mediating Religious Intolerance in Corporate Workplaces,” published in the International Journal for Religious Freedom, Nascimento argues that one of the most overlooked institutions promoting religious freedom today is not a public body or a religious organization but an internal corporate network: the faith-oriented Employee Resource Group (ERG).
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