Protecting Religious Freedom from Fear: Italian Lessons on Islam, the Public Sphere, and the Limits of Judicial Review

 

 

 

Post by Andrea Pin, Associate Professor of Comparative Public Law, University of Padua, and Luca Pietro Vanoni, Associate Professor of Comparative Public Law,  University of Milan

The Italian constitutional framework might be of interest for those who reflect on the avenues of religious and social integration in the early 21st century. Though the 1948 Constitution has secured ample religious freedom guarantees for citizens and noncitizens alike, recent years have put increasing pressure on Italian legal infrastructure.

Church and State in Italy: Friends or Foes?

Despite unification succeeded against the will of the Pope in the nineteenth century under the Kingdom of Piedmont, Italy has always been quintessentially Catholic. Even Mussolini boosted his regime by blending Fascism, Italian nationalism, and the national Catholic identity. Italian politics between the 1940s and the 1990s was largely controlled by the Christian Democratic Party. Romans and even off-the-city Italians alike still gather each Sunday to attend the Pope’s address at the twelve o’clock Angelus in Vatican’s St. Peter’s square. (more…)

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The Chained Wife Problem: Religious and Secular Perspectives

Dmytro Vovk is Director of the Centre for the Rule of Law and Religion Studies, Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and co-editor of Talk About: Law and Religion.

In January 2020, it was reported that a Jewish woman in London launched a private prosecution against her ex-husband who had refused to grant her a religious divorce, called a get. Though they were divorced under civil laws, the absence of a religious divorce chained the wife in her marriage and negatively affected her life in the community, primarily by preventing her from remarrying. The woman and her lawyers claimed that the husband’s behavior should be prosecuted under a 2015 law criminalizing “controlling and coercive behavior” as a form of domestic abuse. The threat of criminal conviction convinced the ex-husband to grant the woman the get, and she later revoked her action as a result. (more…)

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The Aguna Problem – Recent Developments

Haim Shapira is Professor of Law at Bar-Ilan University (Israel) 

In a recent case in the UK, a Jewish woman was able to obtain a get (bill of religious divorce) from her husband by launching a private prosecution against him for controlling or coercive behavior. This has been described as a landmark case in the struggle of Jewish women to obtain religious divorces from uncooperative husbands. In this short post I explain the problem of aguna (“chained” wife), review recent developments in this area, and explain why this last case is truly groundbreaking. (more…)

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