Covid-19 Pandemic, Religious Freedom and the Courts

The unprecedented health crisis, due to the spread of COVID-19, had an overwhelming impact not only on our personal lives, but also on the exercise of religious freedom, which suffered unprecedented restrictions. Legal systems responded individually, and with differences, to the pandemic emergency, ranging from a complete interruption of the collective exercise of religious worship to a more cautious recognition of forms of religious accommodation. The present paper aims to compare the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on the exercise of religious freedom in different legal contexts, and to investigate how the pandemic crisis emphasized underlying judicial, political, socio-cultural challenges. The paper will focus on the key role courts played in the management of religious freedom during the pandemic and on different judicial responses aimed at balancing between competing rights and at recalibrating the crucial relationship between public religiously-neutral policies and claims for religious accommodation.