Reasonable accommodation of religious claims in workplaces in Europe? Basic Tensions, Limitations, Possibilities, and Trends. A comparison between different European countries

Tensions or conflicts between rights certainly are normative tensions but not of the kind of ‘normativity’ characteristic for moral philosophy. Quite to the contrary, these are tensions inherent in the legal norms (i.e. norms claiming legal validity in the respective jurisdiction) as contained in international conventions (e.g. the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)) as well as in the constitutions and laws of states. Consequently, judges and legislators are constantly dealing with the ‘basic tensions’ between human rights and interests by weighing and balancing them in specific laws and in specific cases and contexts. By doing so, they also decide how the multicultural state and private parties should deal with the increased religious diversity on the ground and prevent possible tensions to escalate into full-blown conflicts. Laws and jurisprudence may entail forms of reasonable accommodation – in a broad, not only legal sense – of religious claims, but quite often they also exclude the possibilities for reasonable accommodation. The latter can be the case when priority is given to formal conceptions of equality to the detriment of more substantive conceptions, and when religion is perceived in a particular sphere of life as problematic, disruptive, and out-of-place.