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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Religious Law and Human Rights

Bahá’í Temple in Wilmette, Illinois / Istock

This series examines religious law as a human rights issue. Drawing on a variety of cases, contributors explain how Muslim and Jewish law and adjudication operate in the secular legal system of the United Kingdom and the mixed legal order of the State of Israel; how religion is being utilized to alienate religious minorities in Iran and Pakistan; and why traditional courts sometimes successfully replace secular legal institutions in serving justice in Kyrgyzstan. What unites these contributions is the authors’ intent to challenge and deepen readers’ basic knowledge about the interplay between religious law and human rights norms in different legal settings. This series is based on presentations given at the ICLRS 32nd Annual International Law and Religion Symposium, 7 October 2025.

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Border Disputes: Religious Adjudication Along the Private-Public Nexus in Israel

Ori Aronson is an associate professor of law and the deputy director of the Menomadin Center for Jewish and Democratic Law at the Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law.

The post is a part of the Religious Law and Human Rights series.

In 2017, Israel’s Supreme Court was asked to decide a peculiar question: could a state court tell a religious community to shun one of its members? The case involved a husband who refused to grant his wife a Jewish religious divorce, a gett. Under Orthodox Jewish law, without her husband’s consent the woman could not remarry or have children who would be recognized as legitimate. Israeli law, by giving exclusive jurisdiction over Jewish marriage and divorce to rabbinical courts, effectively entrenches this discriminatory rule. To mitigate its harshest consequences, state rabbinical courts have long been empowered to impose coercive civil sanctions, executed by the state’s enforcement apparatus: freezing assets, revoking drivers’ licenses, even jailing recalcitrant husbands. But these powers do not always work. In some ultra-Orthodox communities, social shame matters more than loss of liberty. So rabbinical judges began invoking traditional sanctions from medieval Jewish law—calling on neighbors to ostracize the stubborn husband until he relented.

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