In the contest of a wider pluralism of the Italian society, legislation still struggles to guarantee an real equal treatment to all religious minorities. Religious denominations - who ratified an intesa with the Government - are for sure in a privileged position compared to those who are still regulated by the general law. Among the last ones, the Italian jurisprudence is playing an important role to find a balance especially on those issues that ask for a more decise government of religious diversity.
In the multicultural societies, lawyers are more and more often engaged in identifing useful tools to solve the rising conflicts between fundamental rights. The exercise of freedom of religion and freedom of expression can led into this kind of phenomena that could be taken into consideration by law, like hate speech and religious hate speech. The paper tries to approach two particular form of hate speech, the political and the religious one, to check if some alternative models of protection could be implemented to assure an effective protection of minorities without any sacrifice of individual fundamental rights.
This article examines the legal treatment of religious dissent from a comparative perspective, by focusing on the legal evolution from intolerance to toleration, and from toleration to emancipation in France, Italy, Norway and the United Kingdom. Historically, in Europe, only people professing the official religion were regarded as full members of the political community. Those who professed another religion were expelled, persecuted, discriminated or – in the best cases – merely tolerated. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in different degrees and forms according to the country concerned, European states started separating citizenship from religious belonging – a fundamental step in the process of secularisation of law in Europe. This development led to the emancipation of religious dissenters through the recognition of both the principle of equality of all citizens before the law, regardless of one's religion or belief, and the individual right to freedom of religion and belief.
Human rights – Right to respect for private and family life – Right to marry – Interference with – Same-sex couple filing appeal against Municipal Civil Registrar's refusal to publish banns of marriage – Refusal upheld by civil courts of first and second instance – Neither Italian Constitution nor Civil Code providing gender-related definition of marriage – Civil Code regulating marriage between man and woman but not between same-sex couples – Constitutional Court's existing ruling on analogous case upholding current legislation under (1) Constitutional principles of human dignity and equality, (2) European Convention on Human Rights and Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union relying on state's margin of appreciation on regulation of same-sex partnerships, (3) Court's lack of jurisdiction to extend right to marry to same-sex couples – Same-sex couple requesting referral to Constitutional Court for alleged unconstitutionality of Civil Code on basis of (a) denial of right to contract marriage on an equal basis to non-homosexuals, (b) discrimination based on sexual orientation, (c) limitation of legal capacity based on sexual orientation, (d) diminution of social dignity of homosexual persons, (e) prevention of development and expression of personality within type of union widely recognized by international and European human rights charters – Whether court should overrule previous ruling on same-sex marriage – Whether exclusion of same-sex couples from right to marry unlawful under multi-level (international, European and national constitutional) system of human rights protection – Italian Civil Code arts 107, 108, 143, 143 bis , 143 ter , 153 bis – Italian Constitution arts 2, 3, 10.1, 22, 29, 117 – Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union arts 9 and 21 – European Convention on Human Rights, arts 8, 12, and 14.
