REMINDER: PLURI-LEGAL
Members might be interested in the excellent Pluri-Legal, an e-mail discussion group on JISC mail.
The group 'is devoted to issues regarding the legal accommodation of cultural, ethnic and religions minorities in Europe.' It's often the site of informed and invigorating exchanges.
The following articles were recently circulated:
Asking about
reasonable accommodation in England
Interviews conducted with leading
actors in England asking a range of questions about religious diversity and the
legal framework and, in particular, about reasonable accommodation, helped
identify a number of areas of concern. There was some doubt about whether
specific legal provision should be brought in to guarantee reasonable
accommodation. However, there was broad support for having the principle
adopted in the practice of employers, whereas some preferred the current
informality rather than the principle being enforced through litigation. None
of the respondents came up with illustrations outside Judaism, Christianity or
Islam. The results are consistent with recent critical studies showing that the
assumption in social sciences that religion is a universal has been imported
from theology. Religion-based questions only pick out certain phenomena
specific to some cultures and an inevitable skew is created when asking such
questions because they make sense only within an Abrahamic religious framework.
Although enabling the identification of some aspects of culture considered to
merit reasonable accommodation on the grounds of religion, the results also
pose questions about the adequacy of current standard research methodologies
which assume that religion is a universal.
Accommodating religious claims in
the Dutch workplace: Unacknowledged Sabbaths, objecting marriage registrars and
pressured faith-based organizations
This article analyses religious claims
in the workplace arising from tensions related to religious diversity in the
Netherlands. On the basis of interviews with leaders in the religious,
political and public sectors, we look at the perception of such tensions and
discuss the feasibility of accommodating them. Our study distinguishes between
the individual cluster (private and public sectors) and the collective cluster.
In the former our respondents argue that individual religious employees in the
private sector are not under pressure; rather, there is strong support for
these individuals to act in accordance with their religious beliefs. When it
concerns public employment, however, religious civil servants do seem to be
under pressure in the Netherlands; secular respondents argue that civil
servants are part of the state apparatus and therefore have no right to make
direct or indirect distinctions on the basis of their personal beliefs. In the
collective cluster, we found that associational freedoms for religious
organizations and faith-based organizations have also come under secularist
pressure; non-discrimination is often invoked as the supreme principle, trumping
associational autonomy. These observations suggest a shift in the Dutch
tradition of governing religious diversity and portend its significant impact
on the position of religious employees in the Netherlands.
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