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Claiming Religious Freedom at the European Court of Human Rights: Socio-Legal Field Effects on Legal Mobilization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 August 2021

Lisa Harms
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Abstract

How do legal strategies at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) vary among activists in highly asymmetrical social positions? Social scientists have demonstrated that legal mobilization raises the pressure on states to provide broader minority accommodation. While this may be true, such outcome-oriented studies overlook the fact that judicial mobilization is itself deeply imbued with inequalities and divergent interests among diverse activists. We lack comparative studies to examine how such differences play out in litigation. Drawing on a qualitative in-depth study among Sikh, Muslim, Catholic, Evangelical, and secular advocacy groups involved in religious freedom disputes at the ECtHR, this article argues that claims making often is a balancing act between legal power relations and extra-legal commitments, which leads to variation in activists’ leverage to challenge legal marginalization. First, hostile legal environments discourage more easily activists with weaker transnational connections who are in vulnerable domestic positions. Second, while the most marginalized readily seek to fit identity narratives into dominant legal frames of religion, more powerful actors can target the core of legal principles and power distribution within the legal field as such. Even when unsuccessful in judicial outcomes, they might affect broader political and legal debates.

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Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 46 , Issue 4 , November 2021 , pp. 1206 - 1235
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

Research for this article has been generously funded by the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and the Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Comparative Constitutionalism based at the University of Göttingen. I would like to thank Matthias Koenig, Kathy Rousselet, Ayelet Shachar, Ran Hirschl, and Martijn van den Brink for extensive comments and support. Earlier drafts of this article have been discussed with the joint Work-in-Progress Seminar of the Department of Ethics, Law, and Politics and the Max Planck Fellow Group in Comparative Constitutionalism at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. I am grateful for the valuable inputs of all participants, especially Alexander Hudson, Berihun Gebeye, Mareike Riedel, and Mariana Velasco Rivera. I am especially thankful to the four anonymous reviewers for extremely generous and constructive comments.

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