Róbert Dobrovodský
Public Defender of Rights
Freedom of thought and religion in the context of the work of the public defender of rights
In his contribution, the Public Defender of Rights will present his findings and planned steps in the area of protecting freedom of thought and religious belief. The Public Defender of Rights has submitted a proposal to the Ministry of Culture to amend the law on freedom of religious belief. Under current legislation, in order to register a new church or religious society, it is necessary to submit affidavits from at least 50,000 adult members who are citizens of the Slovak Republic and have permanent residence in the Slovak Republic. After a legal analysis of the current legislation, the Public Defender of Rights concluded that this stipulation is disproportionate, discriminatory, and unnecessary in a democratic society.
The main reason is that unless it fulfils the condition of submitting affidavits from at least 50,000 citizens, a church or religious society cannot acquire legal subjectivity. This situation means that the church or religious society does not legally exist, which prevents it, for example, from acquiring or using real estate, does not allow it to employ clergy or employees, and causes a number of other practical problems.
In the second part of his contribution, the Public Defender of Rights will point out problems occurring in prisons, for example in cases of refusal to allow prayer items or problems with access to religious services in prisons.
JUDr. Róbert Dobrovodský, PhD., LL.M. was elected as the Public Defender of Rights by the National Council of the Slovak Republic on 9 November 2022. He took up office on the day of taking the oath on 1 December 2022. Previously, he worked as an assistant to a Member of Parliament of the National Council of the Slovak Republic, as a university associate professor or as a civil servant of the Ministry of Justice of the Slovak Republic.
Since his student days, he has worked in NGOs dedicated to protecting human rights and freedoms (League of Human Rights Advocates) or protecting the rights of victims of domestic violence (Alliance of Women of Slovakia).
In 2005, he graduated from the Faculty of Law of Trnava University in Trnava. He simultaneously completed a two-year study of Austrian law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Vienna. He continued to extend his qualifications through a full-time study programme on German law (LL.M) at the Faculty of Law at the Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen in Germany, as well as by pursuing doctoral studies at the Faculty of Law of the Trnava University in Trnava, from which he received the academic degree of PhD.
He undertook research study visits to the Department of Civil and Commercial Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Basel in Switzerland (2007-2008) and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Germany (2017).
Since 2008, he has been working at the Faculty of Law of Trnava University in Trnava as an assistant professor. From 2009 to 2020, he held the position of Chief State Adviser on civil and commercial law in the legislative section at the Ministry of Justice of the Slovak Republic.
From 2020, in addition to teaching at the Faculty of Law of Trnava University until he was elected Public Defender of Rights, he worked as an assistant to Katarína Hatráková, a Member of the National Council of the Slovak Republic. During this period, he was also a member of the Legislative Committee of the Government of the Slovak Republic. He served as chairman of the Council’s expert group during the Slovak Presidency of the Council of the EU (Working Party on Civil Law Matters ).
He was also a member of the Slovak delegation for the defense of the combined 3rd to 5th periodic reports of the Slovak Republic during the 2116 and 2117 meetings of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in Geneva. He was a member of the expert group of the Council of the EU.
Since 2020, he has been a member of the editorial board of the international journal FAMRZ – Zeitschrift für das gesamte Familienrecht (published by Verlag Ernst und Werner Gieseking GmbH Regensburg, Germany), focusing on family law.
Further information: https://vop.gov.sk/en/the-public-defender-of-rights/
Eileen Barker
London School of Economics
Peering through the Curtain, then Stepping through the Wall: A West-European Sociologist of Religion Journeys East
I first became interested in the USSR when I visited Ceaușescu’s Romania in the mid-1970s. Further visits to Poland and Albania and the discovery that I had some Armenian ancestry whetted my appetite to find out more. In 1990, I managed to secure a small grant to observe the situation in four Central and Eastern European countries: Romania, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia (as it was then) to find out what was happening. Increasingly fascinated by the rapidly changing scene, I have subsequently taken every opportunity to visit and revisit almost all the post-Soviet countries. In this paper, I describe some of the wide variety of ways in which ‘Mother’ and minority religions have been embraced and/or rejected by the governments and peoples of the region. I also tentatively explore some ways in which the ghosts of an Iron Curtain or a Berlin Wall might have been exorcised – or might still haunt – the different countries insofar as their religious attitudes are concerned.
Eileen Barker OBE FBA FAcSS is Professor Emeritus of Sociology with Special Reference to the Study of Religion at the London School of Economics. Her main research interest is minority religions and the social reactions to which they give rise; but since 1989 she has also been investigating changes in the religious situation in post-communist countries and, more recently, the religions of East Asia. She has around 400 publications (translated into 28 different languages), which include the award-winning The Making of a Moonie: Brainwashing or Choice? and New Religious Movements: A Practical Introduction. In the late 1980s, with the support of the British Government and mainstream Churches, she founded INFORM, a charity now based at King’s College, London, which provides information about the minority religions that is as accurate, objective and up-to-date as possible. In the 1990s, together with Irena Borowik, she was the co-founder of ISORECEA. She is a frequent advisor to governments, other official bodies and law-enforcement agencies around the world; and was the first non-American to be elected President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Honours she has received include the American Academy of Religion’s Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion in 2000 and the ASR’s 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award for Contributions to the Sociology of Religion. In 2000, Queen Elizabeth II appointed her as an Officer of the British Empire (OBE).
Irena Borowik
Jagiellonian University
Religion in Central and Eastern Europe: Decades of Geopolitical Struggle over Identity
The aim of this paper is to reflect on the specificity of the relationship between religion, politics, and identity in the region of Central and Eastern Europe, taking into account both communist and post-communist periods, with particular attention to the most recent developments in the region.
Hans Mol, one of the few scholars who conceptualized the relationship between religion and identity, argued that one of the main functions of religion is the sacralization of identity. If we accept this general statement—and I am convinced that, overall, he was right—a number of questions arise. The first is: how was this function of religion fulfilled under a totalitarian (communist), or as others prefer to call it, socialist regime? What were the mechanisms of identity construction and reconstruction during the political transformation following the collapse of communism? What insights for interpreting the relationship between religion and identity can be drawn from the recent dramatic events: the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war, and the mass migration of Ukrainians?
If we also take into account the proposals of another prominent scholar, Manuel Castells, an additional set of questions emerges: Does religion in the CEE region contribute to the construction of meaning as a source and expression of legitimizing, resistance, or project identities—the categories he distinguishes?
In my presentation, I will attempt to offer some answers to these questions.
Irena Borowik is a Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. A leading scholar in the sociology of religion, her research focuses on religious change in Central and Eastern Europe, the relationship between religion and politics, and the transformation of religiosity in post-communist societies.
She is the co-founder, former President and Honorary Member of the International Study of Religion in Eastern and Central Europe Association (ISORECEA) and the founder of the Nomos publishing house. Professor Borowik serves on the editorial boards of several prominent journals, including the Journal of Contemporary Religion and Religion and Society in Central and Eastern Europe. Her extensive publications include Religion, Politics, and Values in Poland (co-edited with Sabrina P. Ramet) and numerous studies on the intersection of faith, social values, and geopolitics.