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Religious Symbols in European Classrooms (Lautsi and Others v. Italy)
Grand Chamber, Case Of Lautsi And Others V. Italy, Strasbourg, 18 March 2011
Page 15
B. Arguments of the parties
1. The Government
33. The Government did not raise an objection of inadmissibility.
34. They regretted that the Chamber had not had available to it a comparative law study of relations between the State and religions and on the question of the display of religious symbols in State schools. They asserted that the Chamber had thus deprived itself of an essential element, since such a study would have shown that there was no common approach in Europe in these fields, and would accordingly have led it to the finding that the member States had a particularly wide margin of appreciation; consequently, the Chamber, in its judgment, had failed to take that margin of appreciation into consideration, thus ignoring one fundamental aspect of the problem.
35. The Government also criticised the Chamber's judgment for deriving from the concept of confessional “neutrality” a principle excluding any relations between the State and a particular religion, whereas neutrality required the public administrative authorities to take all religions into account. The judgment was accordingly based on confusion between “neutrality” (an “inclusive concept”) and “secularism (an “exclusive concept”). Moreover, in the Government's view, neutrality meant that States should refrain from promoting not only a particular religion but also atheism, “secularism” on the State's part being no less problematic than proselytising by the State. The Chamber's judgment was thus based on a misunderstanding and amounted to favouring an irreligious or antireligious approach of which the applicant, as a member of the Union of atheists and rationalist agnostics, was asserted to be a militant supporter.
36. The Government went on to argue that it was necessary to take account of the fact that a single symbol could be interpreted differently from one person to another. That applied in particular to the sign of the cross, which could be perceived not only as a religious symbol, but also as a cultural and identity-linked symbol, the symbol of the principles and values which formed the basis of democracy and western civilisation; it appeared, for instance, on the flags of a number of European countries. Whatever the evocative power of an “image” might be, in the Government's view, it was a “passive symbol”, whose impact on individuals was not comparable with the impact of “active conduct”, and no one had asserted in the present case that the content of the teaching provided in Italy was influenced by the presence of crucifixes in classrooms.
That presence was the expression of a “national particularity”, characterised notably by close relations between the State, the people and Catholicism attributable to the historical, cultural and territorial development of Italy and to a deeply rooted and long-standing attachment to the values of Catholicism. Keeping crucifixes in schools was therefore a matter of preserving a centuries-old tradition. The Government argued that the right of parents to respect for their “family culture” ought not to infringe the community's right to transmit its culture or the right of children to discover it. Moreover, by contenting itself with a “potential risk” of emotional disturbance in finding a breach of the rights to education and freedom of thought, conscience and religion, the Chamber had considerably widened the scope of those provisions.
Cf. Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) * Ancient Rome * Ancient Greece * The Making of Europe
