In legal discourses on rights, freedom of religion occupies a pivotal position, receiving increasing attention from legal bodies. This book critically evaluates the emerging legal principles and standards that are applied to religious freedom in Europe. Focusing on religious pluralism as an interpretational principle stemming from attempts to define the boundaries of freedom of religion, it examines the expansion of religious pluralism as an underlying principle of different rights regimes and constitutional traditions. It is, however, the static and liberal shape this principle has assumed that is taken up critically here, to reconstruct the possibility of a true religious pluralism.

Introduction Part I: From Non-Confrontation to Obsession - Religious Pluralism as an Emerging Legal Principle in the European Legal Sphere 1. Council of Europe Bodies and Soft-Law Interpretations of Religious Pluralism 2. The European Court of Human Rights and and Judicial Interpretation of the Principle of Religious Pluralism 3. The Relevance of Religious Pluralism in the EU legal order 4. Relevance of pluralism in European domestic regimes Part II: Three Myths of Inclusion 5. On the Way to Elysium - Defining Religion and Registration of New Religious Communities 6. Regulation of Religious Symbols - a European Pandora's Jar 7. Religions and Reproductive Rights - Freedom Changed to Stone? Part III: Religious Pluralism, Human Rights and the Dissident 8. The Hollow Paradigms of Contemporary Debates on Law and Religion and the Failed Potential of Religious Pluralism 9. Repairing Utopia of Rights - Sources of Reconstruction 10. Human rights and the dissident 11. Rights Beyond Structure? - Towards Otherwise than Becoming Conclusions