The Swedish Network for European Legal Studies hosts an annual spring conference on topical legal issues related to the European Union. In 2018, the conference was “Freedom to and Freedom from Religion: The Rule of Law in the European Democratic State.” The network subsequently produced an edited collection with a handful of the presentations from this conference. Edited by Hedvig Bernitz and Victoria Enkvist, Freedom of Religion: An Ambiguous Right in the Contemporary European Legal Order is the fourteenth volume of the network’s long-established book series with Hart Publishing, Swedish Studies in European Law.
The contributions selected by Bernitz and Enkvist review the ambiguities of the right to religious freedom against the backdrop of a changing Europe. Most do so by using Sweden as an illustrative example or case study.
As Bernitz and Enkvist explain in their preface, the book has three parts. The essays in the first part analyze from a conceptual and historical perspective the ways that national and EU laws relate to religion and religious freedom. The essays in the second part focus on religious matters in EU legislation and the case law stemming from the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights. The essays in the third part offer insights on freedom of religion in specific contexts, such as the educational system and health care.
Part one opens with Pamela Slotte’s essay on how international law grapples with the ambivalence and ambiguities of religious freedom. This is followed by two contributions on the historical development of legal regulation of religious freedom in Sweden: Joakim Nergelius describes the nation’s changing religious landscape through the lens of constitutional law, and Reinhold Fahlbeck describes the development of Swedish labor and social legislation.
In the second part, Ronan McCrea addresses the challenges that EU law is currently facing amid a noticeable change in the demographic makeup of the EU member states. McCrea outlines how the European Union may address these challenges in the future, and the discretion given to individual EU member states to handle religious matters. Patrik Bremdal sheds light on how the European Court of Justice has attributed certain characteristics to the Islamic headscarf and how these characteristics have had an impact on ensuing case law. Karin Åström examines the relationship between freedom of religion and other fundamental rights in Sweden. Her contribution has only grown more relevant with time, given the ongoing controversy surrounding Quran burnings in Sweden. Emma Ahlm addresses the communal aspects of religious freedom from an EU perspective. In doing so, she relies on two European legal frameworks: the European Convention on Human Rights and EU law. Her discussion assists in the exposition of how “[t]he differences between the two systems, and in particular their courts, are manifold” (112). Willem Vancutsem uses a political lens to shed light on how religion has, once again, become a topic of discussion, with an emphasis on Islam and the rise of the Islamic State and subsequent terrorist attacks in Europe.
Introducing part three and using the case of Sweden, Lotta Lerwall discusses the issue of faith-based schools and whether they can be restricted by the European Convention on Human Rights. This contribution is, similar to that of Åström: highly topical when considering the case of Sweden. Bernitz links into this discussion as she describes and analyzes the Swedish education system and the challenges that follow from a multicultural society. Using Sweden, and, more specifically, Swedish abortion care, as a case study, Kavot Zillén delves into the ways ethical, moral, and religious beliefs may impede health care professionals in carrying out their duties.
As other reviewers have pointed out, the collection is varied. For example, Patrick Nash describes it as “an eclectic mix of essays from which to pick and choose interesting titbits.”Footnote 1 This feature is one of the book’s main strengths, as the reader can delve into highly topical discussions within the legal community and the public debate, such as religious refusals in health care (chapter 11, but also chapter 3), headscarves (chapter 5, but also parts of chapter 3), faith-based schools (chapter 9), and the ongoing demographic change currently experienced in most EU member states (most prominently in chapter 4).
However, this eclectic feature does not fully extend to the range of jurisdictions described and studied here. As mentioned above, most of the contributions rely on the Swedish example when discussing the contemporary European legal order and freedom of religion. This is understandable given that the book is a product from a Swedish network conference and published as part of the Swedish Studies in European Law series. In fact, only three of the authors are not Swedish (Ronan McCrea from University College London, Pamela Slotte from Åbo Akademi University, and Willem Vancutsem a parliamentary assistant to the Belgian Green Party). However, I note the inaccuracy of the publisher’s claim on the back cover that the book “contains contributions from leading legal scholars in Sweden, the Nordic countries and wider Europe.”
There are both weaknesses and strengths in relying so strongly on the Swedish case and effectively not including the experiences from other European jurisdictions. On one hand, the strong emphasis on Sweden restricts the relevance and longevity of the collection, especially for readers outside of Sweden. On the other hand, the emphasis on Sweden does shed light on contemporary legal issues present in most EU member states. Several of the authors discuss, directly or indirectly, the tensions that have been brought forward by the increase of immigrants in traditionally Christian EU member states.
Sweden is a compelling case study for contemporary legal issues that may be brought forth by a change in demographics, as is evident from Nergelius’s account of the historical development of freedom of religion in Sweden (chapter 2). Nergelius describes Sweden’s development—from a Catholic nation into an Evangelical Lutheran state around the time of King Gustafa Vasa’s death in 1560—and with a population largely agnostic and challenged by a growing number of religious immigrants. Furthermore, Fahlbeck subtly points to how the political commitment to ensure gender equality in Sweden may seep into the legal regulation and public perception of religion in Sweden through, for instance, a ban on female genital mutilation while allowing male circumcision and the debate over the headscarf as a potential oppression of women (chapter 3). Zillén’s essay on abortion care and the Swedish decision not to comply with EU resolution 1763, based on the argument that conscience clauses risked undermining women’s legal right to abortion, neatly links to the matter of Swedish gender equality and how this may influence restrictions on the freedom of religion (chapter 11). Consequently, the Swedish case is a starting place for consideration of a multitude of legal issues that are of relevance and interest to a global audience, even if they are described and discussed from the narrow perspective of one country. When framed in such a way, the book is highly relevant.
Consequently, the ongoing change in demographics and transformation of societal standards and values naturally pose legal challenges at the national level as described through the abundance of contributions relating to Sweden. Additionally, these adjustments also force us to scrutinize to what extent EU law could, or even should, intervene in religious matters. This is the overall ambition of the edited collection, as Bernitz and Envist discuss in the preface, and it is, to a varying degree, dealt with by most of the contributing authors. I highlight the essays by McCrea (chapter 4) and Ahlm (chapter 7) in this respect. McCrea provides a perceptive and highly compelling treatment of the developments within EU law. He stresses that EU law currently acts as “a source of indirect influence denied to ‘outsider’ faiths whose large-scale presence in Europe is more recent and who are less likely to be able to have formed national culture or public morality” (55).
Freedom of Religion provides the reader with an excellent study of Sweden and the tensions that have arisen between a historically Christian and now largely agnostic population and a growing presence of religiously practicing immigrants, mainly Muslim. It is recommended to the reader who wishes to better understand these tensions and the contemporary legal issues that surface in societies that experience a growing immigrant population. It furthermore inspires additional research and debate in matters linked to the present and future role of the European Union in these matters, given the promotion of the internal market through nondiscrimination and the protection of fundamental rights. As McCrea insightfully reflects, “given the long history of Christianity as the dominant faith in almost all Member States, religiously-influenced traditions are more likely to reflect Christianity than any other faith so the point that Christianity retains a degree of indirect privilege within the EU legal order stands” (55).
