“In their decisions, the judges have cleverly reconciled fundamental rights,” said Frieder Otto Wolf, President of the Humanist Association of Germany, in Berlin today on the latest rulings of the European Court of Human Rights.
In the judgments handed down on Tuesday in the case “Eweida and Others v. United Kingdom” (48420/10, 59842/10, 51671/10 and 36516/10), the court ruled on the claims of four British Christians who felt that their right to practise their religion had been restricted. These included the employee of a registry office who refused to marry homosexual couples after the law on same-sex partnerships came into force in 2005 and a sex therapist employed in a counseling center who refused to counsel homosexual couples. “The decisions not only confirmed that democratic states have a duty to protect homosexual people from discrimination,” said Wolf about the decisions. “They also contain important clarifications that freedom of religion is limited by other rights and obligations and does not constitute a fundamental right over and above other rights – as is often claimed by the churches or politically relevant authorities, such as the German Chancellor.” It is also pleasing that the Court’s decisions have “put the myth of a new persecution of Christians, which has recently been increasingly invoked by some groups and also in the media, into perspective to a certain extent”. This is shown, among other things, by the decision on the case of the plaintiff Nadia Eweida, who was dismissed by a British airline for non-compliance with dress regulations and who has now been awarded compensation by the court. In the other cases, Wolf said, the rulings had clearly shown why religious people cannot always evade the duties associated with their job by invoking their personal faith and then sue for unjustified discrimination as a result of the consequences under employment law. Frieder Otto Wolf expressed his regret that such lawsuits are deliberately provoked by lobby groups and influential bodies in order to revive the legend of persecution and marginalization of Christian believers even in Europe and to tie up the resources of the courts. “In any case, the situation in German labor law, a look at the committees of public broadcasting or the conspicuous presence of representatives of the Christian churches in almost all areas of public life expose such warnings of a new hostility towards Christians as dishonest and socially divisive populism.”
