The Need for a Principled Approach to Religious Freedoms

The European Court of Human Rights has adopted a narrow and restrictive approach to the protection of religious freedoms which is inconsistent with some of its own judgments about the importance of religious freedoms. This narrow and restrictive approach has necessarily influenced the approach of the Courts in England and Wales, and the approach is not supportable on any principled grounds. This article examines what has gone wrong, and makes some suggestions for the future.