Beyond religious rights: confronting legal minoritization & structural religious inequality

Legal protection to minorities is offered along several axes: National legislation tends to organise anti-discrimination mechanisms with a focus on individual or personal characteristics, such as origin, race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ability, age etc. International law recognises minorities in relation to ethnicity, language, religion or culture. This group-based understanding of what it means to be a minority stems partly from the experience of European nation states, which inherited a conceptual binary of majorities and minorities from toleration-based regimes. This paper argues that the categories of individual and collective rights do not suffice for understanding social and political marginalisation on account of religious and other dimensions to identity. Rather, following Coretta Phillips’ account of institutional racism and racialisation and the scope for analysing intersectionality and contextuality therein, governments might need a multilevel framework for understanding structural religious inequality and legal minoritization. This framework is not intended to be in competition with the concept of institutional racism and racialisation, however, it would facilitate analogous analysis when religion is in the foreground. The paper will include two cases studies, which are to be decided.