Clashing Vulnerabilities? Revisiting Executief van de Moslims in België and Others v. Belgium with Vulnerability Theory

Jelle Creemers is a professor and the academic dean of religious studies at the Evangelische Theologische Faculteit (ETF) in Leuven, Belgium.

The final judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in the case of Executief van de Moslims in België and Others v. Belgium (13 February 2024) could not have been more clear. The seven judges unanimously held that the Flemish and Walloon decrees banning ritual slaughter of animals without prior stunning did not constitute a violation of Article 9 (freedom of religion or belief) or of Article 14 (nondiscrimination), read in conjunction with Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). This decision ended the appeal of several Belgian Muslim and Jewish organizations and individuals seeking a legal exemption that would allow them to slaughter animals according to their religious convictions. The ECtHR judgment prompted debate among, and critical feedback from, European FoRB experts.

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Armenia’s State-Church Relations: Not Much Room for Optimism

Isabella Sargsyan is an expert on freedom of religion or belief based in Yerevan, Armenia, and a past member of the OSCE/ODIHR Panel of Experts on FoRB (2016–18, 2023–25). 

On 5 January 2026 Armenia’s Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan, formally launched what he described as a reform of the Armenian Apostolic Church (hereinafter the Church or Armenian Church, interchangeably), reading a statement at his residence in the presence of 10 senior clergy who had called for the resignation of Catholicos of All Armenians Garegin II, the Church’s supreme head. The document—which Pashinyan signed in his capacity of Prime Minister—outlined a roadmap for the implementation of reforms, including the removal of the current Catholicos and the formation of a Coordinating Council comprised of Pashinyan and the above-mentioned clerics. This roadmap purportedly addresses perceived failures of Church leadership and condemns the “uncanonical practice of involving the Church in politics and using it to serve various agendas and interests.”

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Measuring Religious Freedom in Perceptions

Olga Breskaya is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology at the University of Padua.

This post is part of a series on the sociology of religious freedom.

Together with theoretical perspectives on and analyses of religion’s judicialization worldwide, A Sociology of Religious Freedom devotes a key section to the empirical study of religious freedom and the methods developed to investigate it. As a coauthor, along with Giuseppe Giordan and James T. Richardson, my appreciation for this section was reinforced during a recent discussion of our book, when a panelist, a constitutional lawyer, made an insightful remark:

You sociologists talk about the measures and degrees of religious freedom. For us judges, who deal with legal cases in courts, there is only one scale—either there is freedom, or there isn’t.

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