The Reconciliation of Freedom of Religion with Anti-Discrimination Rights
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Freedom of religion is commonly regarded as one of the most fundamental and longstanding human rights, and is reflected in a range of international and domestic human rights instruments. More recently, the law has become concerned to enshrine rights to equality, including a right not to be discriminated against on various grounds. Sometimes, the right to freedom of religion is in conflict with the right to equality. Difficult questions arise regarding how such conflict is resolved. Recent decisions in a range of jurisdictions have grappled with such an issue. This article will discuss recent developments in a range of jurisdictions in this context, before considering some of the issues in the literature. This is a vast area.1 For manageability, the article will focus on the conflict between religion rights and anti-discrimination law in the particular context of accommodation, though many of the points made are equally applicable to the conflict between such rights in other contexts. As it happens, since many of the cases have involved discrimination on the basis of sexuality, that is the chosen exemplar of discrimination on ‘prohibited grounds’ used here. In Part I of the article, I document the strong historic links between law and religion, to provide context for the discussion that follows. In Part II, I consider recent developments in this area across a range of jurisdictions, including Australia, Europe, United States and Canada. Part III considers some of the issues of debate from the case law and the academic literature. Specifically, it critically considers the existing religious exemptions to general anti-discrimination provisions, considers arguments that the law ought to protect religious freedom to a greater extent than is currently the case, and the viability of the distinction between belief and manifestation of that belief.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.020 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.073 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".