Religious diversity and reasonable accommodation in the workplace in six European countries
| Date | 01 June 2013 |
| Author | Veit Bader,Floris Vermeulen,Katayoun Alidadi |
| Published date | 01 June 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1358229113493691 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Religious diversity
and reasonable
accommodation in
the workplace in six
European countries:
An introduction
Veit Bader
1
, Katayoun Alidadi
2
and Floris Vermeulen
1
Abstract
After a period during which many in the West, especially Europe, expected religion to
progressively fade away from public life, for various reasons religion has, over the last
two decades, re-established itself as a phenomenon to be reckoned with in the globa-
lized West. It has also become a favoured research topic for, amongst others, social
scientists and legal scholars. While the European Union (EU) has a limited competency
when it comes to matters of religion, in 2000 an important Directive was adopted, pro-
hibiting discrimination on the basis of religion or belief in the area of employment. The
EU’s interest, however, extends beyond the anti-discrimination framework, explaining
why in 2010 it funded a three-year multidisciplinary project on religious diversity and
secularism in Europe (RELIGARE). One of the areas of investigation, illustrating the
various tensions that arise when religious claims are formulated in 21st-century Europe,
concerned the area of employment and labour relations. This article provides an intro-
duction – philosophical, legal and sociological – to a special issue with six contributions
drawing from sociological data collected within the RELIGARE project. From a socio-
logical perspective, these contributions illustrate the challenges and tensions raised by
religion and belief both in secular workplaces (the individual religious freedom cluster)and
1
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2
Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium
Corresponding author:
Katayoun Alidadi, Institute for Human Rights and Critical Studies, Law Faculty, Catholic University
of Leuven, Tiensestraat 41, Box 3416, Leuven 3000, Belgium.
Email: katayoun.alidadi@law.kuleuven.be
International Journalof
Discrimination and theLaw
13(2-3) 54–82
ªThe Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/1358229113493691
jdi.sagepub.com
in faith-based or religious ethos workplaces (the collective religious freedom clus-
ter) in England, the Netherlands, Denmark, Bulgaria, France and Turkey.
Keywords
Employment, human rights, reasonable accommodation, RELIGARE, religion and belief,
religious diversity, secularism
Introduction
Liberal-democratic states in Europe are increasingly confronted with claims to accom-
modate a wide variety of religious beliefs and practices, and this puts pressure on
entrenched institutional arrangements and established balancing of conflicting human
rights in diverse societal fields. As is well known, basic human rights contain tensions
or conflicts between ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ and between ‘collective’ and ‘individual’
autonomy, more specifically between collective or associational freedoms of religious
communities, on the one hand, and individual religious freedoms and other basic rights
of individuals, on the other hand. These tensions are unavoidable. For one, collective
freedom of religion requires a fair amount of autonomy for churches and religious orga-
nizations that has to be balanced with, and limited by, individuals’ basic human rights
such as the freedom of speech/expression/religion and the right to non-discriminatory
treatment. What makes these matters even more challenging is that the individuals
concerned (e.g. minors, dissenters, women, sexual or ethnic minorities) are particularly
vulnerable, even within their own (religious) minority groups.
Tensions or conflicts between rights certainly are normative tensions, but not of the
kind of ‘normativity’ characteristic for moral philosophy. On the contrary, these
are tensions inherentin the legal norms (i.e. normsclaiming legal validity in the respective
jurisdiction) as contained in international conventions (e.g. the International Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms
of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the European Convention on Human
Rights (ECHR)) as well as in the constitutions and laws of most states. Consequently,
judges and legislators are constantly dealing with the ‘basic tensions’ between human
rights and interests by weighing and balancing them in specific laws and in specific cases
and contexts. By doing so, they also decide how the liberal-democratic state and private
parties should deal with the increased religious diversity on the ground and prevent pos-
sible tensions from escalating into full-blown conflicts. Laws and jurisprudence may
entail forms of reasonable accommodation – in a broad, not only legal sense – of reli-
gious claims, but quite often they also hinder or exclude the possibilities for reasonable
accommodation. The latter can be the case when priority is given to formal conceptions
of equality to the detriment of more substantive conceptions, and when religion is per-
ceived in a particular sphere of life as problematic, disruptive and out of place.
In this special issue, we focus – against the background of broader studies and
the results of the RELIGARE project that include family law, public space and state
funding of religions and Faith-Based Organization (FBOs) – on one specific domain:
Bader et al. 55
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