Introduction

It is often claimed that the Human Rights Act 1998 has brought about a legal revolution. As Chapter 2 contended, the human rights era marks a substantial shift in the way in which law and religion interact. Although a number of laws affecting religion were passed following toleration, no general explicit freedom of religion provision was to be found in English law. Religious liberty existed as a broad and largely negative freedom rather than a positive right. Laws protecting religion were ad hoc and exceptional. The Human Rights Act 1998 changed this, giving domestic force to Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The passive tolerance of religious difference was superseded by the prescriptive regulation of religion and the active promotion of religious liberty as a right.

This chapter will examine the actual effect of the Human Rights Act 1998, exploring what effect the incorporation of the Article 9 right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion into domestic law has had so far. In the context of religious freedom, the Act has already been argued in a plethora of cases concerning a range of issues such as corporal punishment, religious dress, purity rings, sacred bullocks and open air funeral pyres. This chapter begins with a very brief description of the Article 9 case law of the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg before analysing the English case law chronologically to map the rise and fall of Article 9 in domestic jurisprudence.