La Liberta Research Articles

Normativa “anti estremismo” e libertà religiosa nella Federazione Russa. Il caso dei Testimoni di Geova

SOMMARIO: 1. Gli interventi contro i Testimoni di Geova nella Federazione Russa - 2. La presenza storica dei Testimoni di Geova nel Paese - 3. La liberta religiosa nella normativa dell’Unione Sovietica - 4. Le leggi sulla liberta di coscienza degli anni ’90 - 5. La legislazione “anti estremismo” e antiterrorismo - 6. Considerazioni conclusive. “Anti-extremism” Legislation and Religious Freedom in the Russian Federation. The case of Jehovah's Witnesses ABSTRACT: The application of anti-extremism legislation to minority religious groups in the Russian Federation has led to a progressive institutional tightening of the persecution and heavy discrimination, especially against Jehovah's Witnesses. Although many of these legislative instruments have existed for over a decade, the Russian government has only recently begun to use them in sustained campaigns designed to punish or exclude non-traditional religions and movements. In the specific case of Jehovah's Witnesses, these measures have taken on the purpose of delegitimising an entire community, solely because of the religious faith being persecuted, with accusations ranging from missionary activity to offending the religious feelings of believers. Overall, these interventions are part of a wider process of ideological control over society, aimed at curbing, if not stifling, the forces of political and religious dissent. It is well known that secularism is based on two fundamental principles: the inviolability of human rights, which constitute the prodrome of political power and therefore of the State, and, secondly, the importance of a culture and institutions that guarantee the effectiveness of pluralism. The analysis of the Russian history is, in this sense, an important perspective because it calls into question the European model of recognition and guarantee of religious pluralism.

L’esperienza del dolore e le ragioni della speranza. Riflessioni sulla recente evoluzione del dibattito giurisprudenziale in tema di dignità umana e fine vita

SOMMARIO: 1. Una premessa di metodo - 2. Giustizia limiti e sacralita del “fine vita” - 3. Tra indisponibilita della vita e diritto di autodeterminazione individuale. La prospettiva della Corte EDU … - 4. … e le prudenti soluzioni del diritto italiano tra leggi e prassi giurisprudenziale - 5. Considerazioni conclusive: esiste la liberta di congedarsi dal mondo? The experience of pain and the reasons for hope. Reflections on the end of life of postmodern man ABSTRACT: The surprising development of biotechnology, new knowledge and unprecedented possibilities of intervention on human beings, have strongly affected the natural events of being born and dying, bringing out new rights and new instances of protection, aimed at ensuring respect for individual self-determination and human dignity in the face of the increasingly pressing intrusiveness of science and technology. Nonetheless, these possibilities offered by science may, for some, not coincide with the ideal conception of life and human dignity, since these are interventions capable of prolonging survival in often very critical conditions, not always adequate to guarantee a life worth living. At this point, the question is whether there is a way to pursue a harmonious composition between the concepts of life and human dignity, in the extreme variety of cases where there is a question of their protection, especially with regard to end-of-life issues.

Sicurezza e prevenzione del terrorismo cosiddetto islamista: il disagio della libertà

SOMMARIO: 1. La nuova retorica della sicurezza - 2. Il terrorismo cosiddetto islamista - 3. Il diritto penale preventivo e la liberta religiosa - 4. Deradicalizzazione e/e laicita - 5. Sicurezza e liberta: per un orientamento costituzionale. Security and Prevention of so-called Islamic Terrorism: Freedom and its discontents ABSTRACT: Security is becoming the priority of the western politics because of the international terrorism, so called Islamic terrorism. The preventive character that the criminal law takes in order to fight it risks hiting the religious freedom of the citizens, misinterpreted as participation to terroristic groups. The risk is high when the prevention measures consist in the deradicalization, read as religious re-education in unfundamentalist direction. In the constitutional State of law, a fair deradicalization has to aim only to the re-education about the separation between politics and religion so as to not prejudice the right of religious freedom.

Le regole alimentari religiose e i menù delle mense scolastiche: una sfida per la laicità?

SOMMARIO: 1. Introduzione - 2. La liberta religiosa e le regole alimentari religiose - 3. Le regole alimentari religiose e la laicita dello Stato - 4. Il menu quaresimale - 5. L’immunita dall’esposizione - 6. Conclusioni. Religious dietary rules and school lunch menus: a challenge for secularism? ABSTRACT: The paper starts from a case of dietary pluralism to discuss the possibility to justify menus sensitive to different religious dietary rules in schools’ canteens. Building on an analysis of the idea of secularism, both in its legal interpretation and in its philosophical understanding in terms of neutrality, I try to show that providing for menus sensitive to different religious dietary rules does not amount to a breach of secularism; it is, rather, a legitimate consequence of the protection of individuals’ rights to freedom of conscience and religion. Moreover, whenever institutions take action to devise and implement such menus they can be taken to act on a commitment to respecting the beliefs of minority groups in society without expecting that these groups, which are often migrant communities suffering of well-known problems of social integration, take on the burden to put forward public claims.

Rilevanza pubblica delle comunità religiose nella dimensione giuridica europea

SOMMARIO: 1. La presenza religiosa nella sfera pubblica - 2. La liberta religiosa collettiva nella CEDU - 3. La condizione giuridica delle confessioni religiose nel diritto della UE - 4. Identita confessionali e identita nazionali europee - 5. Il ruolo “pubblico” delle istituzioni religiose negli Stati europei - 6. In particolare: a) la rilevanza costituzionale dei soggetti confessionali in Germania - 7. Segue: b) la condizione giuridica delle confessioni religiose in Italia. Public relevance of religious communities in the European legal dimension The religious phenomenon appears relevant both on an individual level and on a social level. In many cases religious experience, on the one hand, helps to draw the personal identity of the subject; on the other, it is an element that characterizes various aspects of civil society, up to the influence of the political and institutional dynamics of many contemporary state systems. This paper intends to demonstrate that the religious phenomenon does not appear confined only in the strictly private sphere, but lives and manifests itself also in the public dimension. This approach seems to be confirmed, among other things, by the new public role that religious communities are progressively taking on in the European legal sphere, as well as within individual state systems in Europe. From the analysis of the rules in force both at the European and national level, this work therefore derives a significant legal recognition of the public relevance of religions and religious communities that are direct institutional expression, paying particular attention to the experience gained in the German law and in the Italian legal system.

Le mutilazioni genitali femminili come reato di genere? Un’analisi delle norme europee alla luce del concetto di violenza

SOMMARIO: 1. Introduzione – 2. Le mutilazioni genitali femminili come atto di violenza nelle norme e nei documenti europei degli anni 2000 – 3. Escissione e abuso/brutalita/violenza: binomi appropriati e inevitabili? – 4. L’escissione, il dolore e la sua reinterpretazione – 5. Il rapporto dell’escissione con la comunita, la famiglia e il matrimonio – 6. La Convenzione di Istanbul, le norme francesi e i rischi per la liberta religiosa – 7. Considerazioni conclusive.Female Genital Mutilation as a Gender-Based Crime? (An Analysis of the European Norms in Light of the Concepts of Violence and Religious Freedom)ABSTRACT: Female genital mutilations (FGM) are ancient practices, which are widespread in several geographical areas, and particularly in Africa. The conflict between customary norms and state legal systems, which arises because FGM violate fundamental rights like the right to physical integrity, health, and non-discrimination based on gender/ethnicity/culture, discloses the dialectic between two normative universes; these universes are conceptually distant with regard to the priority given to the individual and the group. Focusing on the reasons related to female genital cutting (FGC), which consists of the ablation, to differing degrees, of female genital organs, this article, argues that the link that European norms establish between FGM and violence, abuse or brutality comes into conflict with the reasons why migrants perpetuate FGC. Therefore, the way gender is mainstreamed into European norms on FGM can have negative effects, which concern courts’ implementation of these norms and migrants’ social inclusion. Furthermore, this article claims that focusing on health instead of gender equality may prove more effective for the eradication of FGM. Through an analysis of French law, it also suggests that the way the national law is adapted to conform to the Istanbul Convention, may represent a danger to religious freedom.

Jean Bodin: dalla tolleranza alla libertà religiosa

SOMMARIO: 1. Premessa - 2. Dalla tolleranza alla possibilita di “riconoscere nel cuore un Dio incorporeo e altissimo” - 3. La liberta religiosa aconfessionale nella definizione della sovranita assoluta - 4. La potesta aconfessionale della sovranita statale e il separatismo - 5. Dalla ragion di Stato della “suprema potesta statale” alla liberta religiosa nell’esercizio della giurisdizione - 6. Conclusione. J ean Bodin from Tolerance to Religious Freedom ABSTRACT: Absolutism, in France, rises also in order to resolve conflicts, affirming the national community and the interests of the State. This is an evaluation that leads to thinking, above all, about J. Bodin and Les le livres de la Republique and to “read” the relationship between and religious liberty. Bodin indicates the limits of tolerance - that is based on the dogma of the exclusive confessional salvation - that reveals to freedom in the theorization of the absolute State. The freedom to manifest own conviction does not undergo to any presumption of exclusive salvation because it intends to proclaim publicly, but also privately, what the individual perceives in consciousness. A dimension of secularism really particular, that reveals the difficult political condition of the wars of religion. The coexistence of the only God, which divine laws sanction in the definition of sovereignty, suggests an overcoming of the confessionism. The civil legal significance of confessions lives the confessional dimension of interreligious dialogue for an understanding of the incorporeal and supreme God of the Colloquium Heptaplomeres.

The denial of religious freedom: a new approach to the system

Text in process of completion, not subject to referee review, of Report at the Conference on La liberta religiosa nell'eta post-secolare in Lugano, Faculty of Theology (27-28 March 2014). SOMMARIO: 1. Introduction: the social power of religions and the need for dialogue - 2. Law as a required hurdle to the “disclaimers” of religious freedom - 3. The restrictions to the exercise of religious freedom: an overview - 4. Religious freedom and social welfare: an inseparable duo - 5. Brief conclusions.

The Tooth that Nibbles at the Soul: Essays on Music and Poetry by Marshall Brown

Marshall Brown. The Tooth that Nibbles at the Soul: Essays on Music and Poetry. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010. Pp. 384. $75.00 cloth/$35.00 paper. Che impensata novita! exclaim the enraged posse of characters in pursuit of Don Giovanni, when they discover Leperello in his master's guise. What a totally unexpected thing! Beset by mille torbidi pensieri, the characters reel, knocked silly. But what truly unexpected, from the Don's point of view, the behavior of everyone else in the opera. From the opening scene, when he grappled with by Donna Anna--e sono assalitrice d'assalita! she later boasts--everyone off script, refusing their roles. Of course, he persists with the old routines the end, deaf the realignment of desire and language occurring around him. Not. doesn't always mean in Don Giovanni, but as Marshall Brown brilliantly adduces in the concluding chapter of his new book, it the opera's signature utterance, along with two other epithets of the modern: sentire (to feel) and battere (to beat/fight), the latter originated by Giovanni and Anna's deadlocked struggle, but which signifies also, Brown suggests, the restless beat of Mozart's music, and the momentous historical change both the Don and Mozart's Prague audience of 1787 must be made hear (Viva la Liberta!). The skeptical energy that pulses through Mozart's Don Giovanni marks a fitting (actually rousing) conclusion Brown's The Tooth That Nibbles at the Soul, a book concerned throughout with facets of skeptical artistry (37) in music and poetry. Abstraction Brown's master term for the negativity that characterizes music and lyric poetry: how both art forms operate upon a deficit of meaning and thus are always pointing the pure necessity and energy of form. The introductory chapter includes a tour of modernist painting--Picasso, Rothko--before concluding that abstraction is a mode, not a period (14) and setting sail for the long eighteenth century. In Brown's hierarchy of arts, the abstraction or immateriality of music the condition which poetry aspires. In Faure's song Rencontre, for example--Brown's reading of which sets the terms for much of what follow--the lyric does not succeed in rescuing the music from abstraction. Rather, Faure's setting introduces a vital indeterminacy, and thus emotional depth, otherwise bland verse. In this way, the lyric art, written, sung, or played, represents an essential musicalization of experience (xi). All arts are one. In chapter two, the oft-derided subcategory of becomes the name for this principle of abstraction, a contrarian move characteristic of the skeptical sensibility Brown brings Romantic definitions of art. not license (44), even less an unbounded state of mind, but rather an achieved affect dependent on craft. Like the Mephistophelean no coursing through Don Giovanni, fantasy a questioning presence audible not only in custom-made settings such as Mendelssohn's Overture A Midsummer Night's Dream, but in such sublime edifices as Beethoven's Fifth. Fantasy Brown's name for that symphony's incomplete catharsis, its lack of a statement form shore up against the restlessness of a pulse (60). Brown's close analyses of momentary musical effects enacts the difficult rescue of music from ideology, linking it to a different kind of meaning that might rescue society from the tyranny of its principles (62). In a later chapter, Brown reiterates the point in a reading of Dickinson, whose empirical poetics of our phantasmic sense-world communicate their spirit the book (as well as its toothsome title): Poetry's estrangements are not transcendence. Rather, they are antiphonal the hymnic strains that regulate belief systems (98). In such moments as these, the very considerable stakes of Brown's enterprise become clear, as well as the specific powers of an interdisciplinary approach that takes music, not text, as the model of art. …