Equal Liberty – Questioning the Right to Freedom of Religion?

Abstract

This paper tackles the question of how to handle the phenomenon of “religion” by widely secularized judicial systems by analyzing the “Equal Liberty”-concept from legal scholars Eisgruber and Sager. While they assume that everything worth protecting is already covered by existing anti-discrimination laws, freedom of expression and association, and judge the right to religious freedom as itself discriminatory, this paper considers how this right can be part of an emancipatory human rights approach, which helps us think beyond an antagonistic relationship between religious freedom and other human rights.