Religion in the Workplace: Eweida and Others v United Kingdom
| Date | 01 March 2014 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12066 |
| Author | Ronan McCrea |
| Published date | 01 March 2014 |
CASES
Religion in the Workplace:
Eweida and Others vUnited Kingdom
Ronan McCrea*
The European Court of Human Rights judgment in Eweida and Others vUnited Kingdom dealt
with the increasingly controversial questions of religious symbols at work and the clash between
free conscience and anti-discrimination norms. In a change of approach, it held that the right to
resign could no longer be seen as adequate protection for religious freedom and that workplace
norms that restrict religious liberty must satisfy a proportionality test. However, it accorded a wide
margin of appreciation to States in reconciling freedom of conscience and freedom from dis-
crimination, ruling that the importance of non-discrimination could justify a failure to exempt a
religious individual from complying with a policy forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual
orientation.
These are interesting times in the area of religion and law. Religion is in the
headlines and is a part of political debate to a degree that would have shocked
commentators in the 1960s, who confidently predicted that its influence would
gradually wither. Debates around immigration and concerns around terrorism
have given a new political importance to the relationship between religion, the
law and the state, and the claims of minority religions for accommodation in
areas such as the workplace are driving reconsideration of the boundaries of
religious freedom in European societies.
At the same time, residual religious influence in areas such as the law relat-
ing to sexual orientation, the beginning and end of life and the nature of
marriage, is declining. Developments in relation to sexual orientation have
been particularly rapid. In most of western Europe a rapid transformation has
changed views of discrimination against those who are gay or lesbian from
being the default position socially and legally, to a deprecated minority posi-
tion. This change has been enormously liberating for gays and lesbians but has
provoked claims on the part of those committed to the orthodox position of
the Abrahamic religions in relation to sexuality, who feel oppressed by the
coercion of their conscience involved in the extension of anti-discrimination
norms to sexual orientation. It is against this background of change and con-
troversy that the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) was recently
required to rule on four heavily-publicised cases from the United Kingdom
*Faculty of Laws, University College London and Academic Fellow of the Inner Temple. The author
acted, with Lord Lester QC and Max Schaefer, for the National Secular Society in its intervention in
these cases. He would like to thank Dr Virginia Mantouvalou for her helpful comments. All errors
remain the author’s.
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© 2014 The Author. The Modern Law Review © 2014 The Modern Law Review Limited. (2014) 77(2) MLR 277–307
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
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