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Tenacious and Elusive: Religion-State Ties in the Greek Educational Domain

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Human Rights and the Separation of State and Religion

Part of the book series: Religion and Human Rights ((REHU,volume 10))

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Abstract

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has indisputably played a significant role in religion-state relations in the Greek context. Through a series of cases since the very first case in which that court found a state in violation of religious freedom – Kokkinakis v. Greece, 1993 – the ECtHR has successively issued judgements against the state of Greece which have underpinned fundamental changes to privileges enjoyed by the Orthodox Church of Greece vis-à-vis the state and, by extension, to limitations experienced by minority religions in Greece. From the rights to proselytism to the legal status of religious minorities and to the practice of sharia law in Greece, the ECtHR has directly or indirectly, immediately or with delayed effect, pushed towards the separation of church and state in Greece. This article explores the ECtHR’s engagement with the case of religion in education (i.e. Religious Education, morning prayer, churching of students, etc.) as a possible exception, one in which the categories of ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ as regards education, and ‘separation’ as regards religion-state relations appear as rather complicated. By demonstrating how contingent on national politics the ECtHR’s impact is, the article offers insight into the limitations of supranational human rights regimes when it comes to state-religion separation in national and subnational contexts.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The other two are Hasan and Chaush v. Bulgaria (2000), re governmental interference with the internal organization of the Muslim religious community, and Buscarini v. San Marino (1999), re the requirement for all those holding public office to take a religious oath.

  2. 2.

    The statistics provided by the ECtHR for all Article 9 violations found by the Court by the year 2017 indicate that the Greek state received 13 of the total of 71 ECtHR judgements finding violations of religious freedom. See https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/stats_violation_1959_2017_eng.pdf

  3. 3.

    It is noteworthy that there is another case against the state of Greece currently pending before the ECtHR which again challenges the Greek proselytism ban: Damovolitis v. Greece. For more on Kokkinakis and its impacts, see Temperman et al. (2019), and Fokas (2017a, b).

  4. 4.

    It is worth noting that in this period the left-wing government had a debate with the judiciary due to changes in the judiciary’s supreme administration that the government had introduced and which were unwelcome by the judiciary.

  5. 5.

    Papageorgiou and Anastasiadou/Raviolou.

  6. 6.

    Establishment of religion entails state official recognition and support of a particular religious institution as a national institution.

  7. 7.

    ECtHR, Kjeldsen, Busk Madsen and Pedersen v. Denmark, App. Nos. 5095/71; 5920/72; 5926/72, 7 December 1976.

  8. 8.

    It should be noted that in the Court’s first 33 years (1959–1992), cases related to the right to religious freedom were dealt with exclusively by the European Commission of Human Rights and not by the Court (until the introduction of Protocol 11 in 1998, a two-tiered system was in place, with the European Commission of Human Rights filtering which cases would reach the Court). Protocol 11 abolished that Commission and allowed for direct access of individual applicants to the Court.

  9. 9.

    ECommHR, Angeleni v. Sweden, App. No. 10491/83, 3 December 1986.

  10. 10.

    ECommHR, Bernard and Others v. Luxembourg, App. No. 17187/90, 8 September 1993.

  11. 11.

    ECtHR, Appel-Irrgang and Others v. Germany, App. No. 45216/07, 6 October 2009.

  12. 12.

    ECtHR, Folgero v. Norway, App. No. 15472/02, 29 June 2007.

  13. 13.

    ECtHR, Hasan and Eylem Zengin v. Turkey, App. No. 1448/04, 9 October 2007.

  14. 14.

    ECtHR, Mansur Yalçin and Others v. Turkey, App. No. 21163/11, 16 September 2014.

  15. 15.

    ECtHR, Grzelak v. Poland, App. No. 7710/02, 22 November 2010.

  16. 16.

    ECtHR, Valsamis v. Greece, App. No. 21787/93, 18 December 1996.

  17. 17.

    ECtHR, Efstratiou v. Greece, App. No. 24095/94, 18 December 1996.

  18. 18.

    ECtHR, Dahlab v. Switzerland, App. No. 42393/98, 15 February 2001.

  19. 19.

    ECtHR, Leyla Şahin v. Turkey, App. No. 44774/98, 10 November 2005.

  20. 20.

    ECtHR, Dogru v. France, App. No. 27058/05, 4 December 2008.

  21. 21.

    ECtHR, Kervanci v. France, App. No. 31645/04, 4 December 2008.

  22. 22.

    For an excellent analysis of Islam related cases and discussion of discrepancies between the Court’s handling of Christianity and Islam, see Durham et al. 2012.

  23. 23.

    ECtHR, Fernández Martínez v. Spain, App. No. 56030/07, 12 June 2014.

  24. 24.

    Or the Commission on Human Rights which preceded it in this role until 1998.

  25. 25.

    The Court covers the 47 member states of the Council of Europe, which are also signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights that the Court defends.

  26. 26.

    NB: The relevant ECtHR case law is not limited to cases considered under Art. 2 of Protocol 1.

  27. 27.

    See Jackson (2015a, b) for rejoinders to Gearon’s critique. See also Haldane (1988) and Arthur and Holdsworth (2012) for contributions to the normative debates. See also Berger (2013, pp. 110–111) for an analysis, from the Canadian context, of shifts from ‘freedom from religion’ case law to ‘freedom from the secular’ in religious groups’ push-back on a secular or nonreligious default environment.

  28. 28.

    The legitimacy of the ECtHR certainly faced a significant challenge, and specifically in the general area of religion and education, through the Lautsi v. Italy case. As is now firmly entrenched in the relevant literature, intense national debates and transnational mobilisations (including the third-party intervention by ten states, represented before the Court by a US-based lawyer) were set off in reaction to the Court’s 2009 judgement, and these had certain impact on the Court’s radical reversal of that judgement in 2011 (from a unanimous 7-0 Chamber decision to a 15-2 majority Grand Chamber decision in the other direction).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. International Relations and European Affairs, American College of Greece, Athens, Greece

    Effie Fokas

  2. Department of Theology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    Marios Koukounaras-Liagkis

Authors
  1. Effie Fokas
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  2. Marios Koukounaras-Liagkis
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Correspondence to Marios Koukounaras-Liagkis .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Theology, Salesian Pontifical University, Rome, Italy

    Francis-Vincent Anthony

  2. Faculty of Theology, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

    Hans-Georg Ziebertz

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Fokas, E., Koukounaras-Liagkis, M. (2023). Tenacious and Elusive: Religion-State Ties in the Greek Educational Domain. In: Anthony, FV., Ziebertz, HG. (eds) Human Rights and the Separation of State and Religion. Religion and Human Rights, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33998-1_7

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