Suchergebnisse

Decisions of the United States Supreme Court in 1963 and 1972 expanded the scope of the free exercise clause of the First Amendment beyond any previous inter pretation of that clause in American judicial history. Although it is still understood that government may prohibit religiously motivated behavior which represents harm to individuals or to the public welfare, civil authorities now may intervene only when the religious activity threatens a compelling state interest. The possibilities of religious activity are abundant, and government intervention is limited to only the gravest offenses of the public order. This article examines some of the areas of health, broadly defined, in which religious attitudes have conflicted with state interests: the handling of poisonous snakes and drinking of poison in religious worship, the use of prohibited drugs in worship, compulsory blood transfusions for those who have theological objections to them, and the application of public health laws to those whose theology rejects medicine altogether. In the light of these cases, as much as the American constitutional system exalts religious liberty, it can never be unfettered. But, even in this area, it is imperative that our governmental units make religious liberty the rule and its curtailment the exception.

Abstract
This paper tackles the question of how to handle the phenomenon of "religion" by widely secularized judicial systems by analyzing the "Equal Liberty"-concept from legal scholars Eisgruber and Sager. While they assume that everything worth protecting is already covered by existing anti-discrimination laws, freedom of expression and association, and judge the right to religious freedom as itself discriminatory, this paper considers how this right can be part of an emancipatory human rights approach, which helps us think beyond an antagonistic relationship between religious freedom and other human rights.

Guarantee of freedom of religion and its regulation with international and regional legal instruments is undoubtedly the foundation of ever modern democracy. However, elaborating freedom of conscience and religion has to be done within the framework of a positive legal system, i.e. Laws and the Constitution, which underlie the concept of organizing the state itself. Religious beliefs have been present for millenniums and their beginnings are in the very essence of both humans and communities, and even countries. The Republic of Macedonia along with all other states which were once part of the common Yugoslav federation has two periods of treatment of the issue of religious freedom, i.e. the freedom of conscience and religion. The well-known concept of separation of religious feelings from the statelegal system was practiced in the former common federation. Relying on that concept and upon gaining independence, the Republic of Macedonia has developed a different, primarily symbiotic blend of the state with its two biggest religious communities, thus attempting to deal with this extremely sensitive issue, more or less successfully, which is actually the basic principle of human freedoms.