Regulierungen der Religionsfreiheit

Article 18 on the freedom of religion in the Declaration of Human Rights from 1948 presented religious studies with the task of rethinking its concept of religion. Through it, religious organisations were granted inviolable rights. Now religion is also manifesting itself in international religious NGOs, whose public activities have made them global players and, as a result, possible partners in or even opponents of states’ foreign policies. The majority of studies on religious freedom do not go beyond Article 18 and its emergence. They rarely examine the question of how it should be implemented in the further explanations and institutions of the UN and those of the EU, and thus constitute a void in research into the history of religion, religious sociology, religious studies and theology. In this study, the author focuses on how freedom of religion has been realised and regulated both in terms of universal and European human rights as well as in the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.