This book is essentially a collection of papers, reworked and edited into chapters, presented at an international symposium titled ‘Religious diversity and the European workplace’ which took place at the Law Faculty of the Catholic University of Leuven on 13 January 2011. The chapters are organised into two parts, both parts comprising two sections. The first part deals with the European components of the religion and workplace debate, looking at the case law of the European Court of Human Rights in Section I and the EU Equality Directives in Section II. The second part considers Turkey, France and Belgium in section I and some more general comparative works in Section II.
The volume is strongest when tackling the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights; this might be explained by the fact that the jurisprudence on religious rights has been more developed in this area. I particularly enjoyed the principled criticisms of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights set out in Chapter 2 by Saila Ouald Chaib, who reveals ‘an ambitious and audacious aim: improving the legal reasoning of the Court in cases concerning religious accommodation in the workplace’ (p 49). The recent decision of the Court in Eweida v The United Kingdom on 15 January 2013 showed that its jurisprudence has begun to develop and that some of the criticisms have been heeded.
Some of the contributions are social rather than legal, in particular Chapter 10, which considers ‘Jewish women in the Belgian workplace: an anthropological perspective’. However, these provide very interesting analyses of the way in which religious beliefs and religious cultures affect the whole of a person's life.
There is little doubt that it would make states easier to govern if everyone either shared the same religious belief or had no religious beliefs. However, since at least the signing of the Treaties of Westphalia between May and October 1648, western Europe has recognised that rulers cannot compel everyone living in one state to believe the same thing or share a religious belief. This book, by addressing the ways in which differences can be accommodated in a principled way, and by providing a comparative approach, makes a helpful contribution to the debate.
