18 December 2025
Headscarves and the Wrong Balance
To date, the CJEU has decided 6 cases concerning women who wanted to wear a headscarf at work. All judgments suggest that considerations of neutrality can trump religious freedom. Although the CJEU made some general and abstract comments about the importance of freedom of religion, it did not really address what the bans, in practice, meant for the individual women involved, neither did engage with the possibility that these neutrality rules could constitute sex, race and/or intersectional discrimination. The CJEU thus provide little protection for the rights of headscarf wearing Muslim women. Continue reading >>
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18 December 2025
Playing with Fire
The Court of Justice’s narrow understanding of religious freedom under EU law is playing with fire. In the name of anti-discrimination and neutrality, it risks undermining religious freedom in ways that are particularly detrimental to Muslim minorities. At the same time, the Court proceeds as if European constitutional systems were roughly homogeneous, disregarding the profound diversity of church–state relations. This double-blind spot makes the CJEU’s approach not only normatively troubling, but structurally ill-suited to the realities it seeks to address. Continue reading >>
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