Religion and emergency rules

Abstract

The emergency caused by SARS-Cov-2 pandemic has forced governmental authorities - from all over the world and at different levels - to enact exceptional rules that have limited the fundamental rights of freedoms.

These measures, initially considered provisional, have been repeated everywhere, posing a further question in terms of the sustainability over time of rules dictated to face an emergency.

This emergency presents original profiles, due to its link with the health. However, many legal aspects have already been partially addressed with reference to other emergencies, e.g. those determined by migratory flows.

These "emergency laws" are highly critical, especially when they do not strike the right balance between guaranteeing security and respecting human rights.

This project is in continuity with the research already conducted by the DiReSom group (which has prepared the first international website dedicated to the theme Religion, Law and Covid-19 Emergency: www.diresom.net), and it intends to investigate, in an interdisciplinary perspective, how emergencies affect regulatory production and what their social effects are, with specific reference to the religious factor. Our main objective is to study these phenomena in a comparative way, paying attention to both state and confessional legislation. The solutions adopted by the individual states reflect different national constitutions and laws, but we think that it is possible to identify some elements of connection that can support – both from a theoretical and applicative point of view - the balance between the different rights at stake, and therefore help in the future to formulate emergency rules increasingly respectful of fundamental rights, especially of religious importance.

The project will be developed according to four main steps The unit of the Principal Investigator (Pisa) - in addition to play a role of coordination and synthesis - will study the birth of emergency measures in state legal systems, in order to analyze the impact on the religious factor. The Ferrara unit will address the study of the health emergency and its repercussions from the point of view of the faith communities, with specific reference to the actions put in place by the Abrahamic religions in terms of contrast to the pandemic. The Messina unit will focus its attention on the impact of the pandemic on the rights of religious minorities, with the aim of verifying the consequences in both legal and socio-economic terms. Finally, the Genoa unit will deal with the phenomenon of migration, studying the impact of the pandemic on an aspect that is already affected by emergency rules, that is, the relationship between public security, reception and religious element.