—Claudia E. Haupt, Associate-in-Law, Columbia Law School
Cross-posted from the Center for Law and Religion Forum at St. John’s University School of Law
Just in time for my post on symbols, the New York Times picks up the topic as well. So this is page A1 news! Of course, the underlying issue—the treatment of religious symbols in the public sphere—is hardly new. But it continues to be contested and rich and fascinating to study in comparative perspective.
Let me focus in this post on the question of attribution and the role of individual religious expression as opposed to expression of a religious viewpoint or identity by the state. The Times story opens with a Roman Catholic archbishop reminiscing about visiting Brussels and encountering there “the insistently secular bureaucracy of the European Union.” The story continues with the statement “’They let me in wearing my cross,’ the archbishop recalls.” Should he have been surprised? The story then continues with “the rude surprise” that ensued after the Commission objected to crosses on commemorative Euro coins. But should that be surprising?
None of this should be surprising to anyone accustomed to the U.S. concept of a free exercise and establishment distinction. Attribution is a central threshold question in the United States. We are very familiar with the attribution issue, because deciding whether the message is one attributable to the state or the individual determines whether the message is fully protected as a matter of free speech and free exercise or whether it is subject to Establishment Clause limits (which, by the way, does not automatically indicate a violation on the merits). When I talk about religious messages in the U.S. context, I must therefore distinguish between messages of the government and messages of individuals. (I’ve written about the intricacies of that question in the U.S. context in more detail here.)
This (from the U.S. perspective) familiar question of attribution is also gaining importance in the European context, and what makes it particularly interesting there is that we do not have this split into free exercise and nonestablishment in most systems. Take, for instance, the European Convention on Human Rights. The Convention itself contains no Establishment Clause-type provision. But in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) an interesting development is occurring. Article 9 contains the Convention’s religious freedom provision. In Article 9(2) we find the limitations clause (also a typical feature of continental constitutions). It states: “Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.”
As I’ve discussed here, recent case law seems to be slowly developing the meaning of the limitations clause beyond the limit on individual free exercise that it originally was by focusing on the type of democratic society envisioned by the Convention. An indicator of that development is the ECtHR’s emphasis on pluralism in the sense of allowing citizens of all faiths as well as nonreligious citizens to flourish in a democratic society. And that leads to a limit to religious identification imposed on the state itself, as opposed to limit on the individual’s free exercise. In short, the clause might become a limit on the state’s identification with religion. This is where we ask the attribution question. And in a system without a distinction between free exercise and non-establishment, the interesting point to me is that we’re now starting to ask this question in the first place.
So if we ask about attribution—a question that has not traditionally been asked in the European context precisely because those systems tend not to have an establishment clause-like provision—we ask about the state’s actions, or religious expressions, as distinct from the individual’s actions or messages. And if we set the problem up this way, we are creating a dichotomy that many European national systems do not recognize. And so I find myself wondering whether national concepts of the public sphere may be on a collision course with what the European Court of Human Rights appears to be tending toward.
Suggested citation: Claudia Haupt, “Says Who?,” Int’l J. Const. L. Blog, June 23, 2013, available at: http://www.iconnectblog.com/2013/06/says-who/.
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