“I have a great deal of worry about the fact that courts tend to say that when there’s an encroachment on the interests of others, when there’s a conflict of rights, religious rights always lose. The freedom of religion is always outweighed by something else. I think the great problem in these cases is that you have a conflict of rights and you don’t solve the situation by finding on one side without any attempt to accommodate the other.”
Judges are more likely to interfere with Christians’ freedom to practise their faith than Muslims or Sikhs, a leading Oxford philosopher has claimed.

Professor Roger Trigg said British courts are reluctant to “lecture” members of other faiths about their rights but “think they know about Christianity”.

He said they were treading on “very dangerous ground” by making decisions about what is and what is not a crucial component of someone’s religion.

Professor Trigg, one of Britain’s foremost authorities on religious freedom, was assessing a European Court of Human Rights judgment involving four Britons who believed that their right to practise their faith at work had been suppressed.

Nadia Eweida, a British Airways check-in clerk, and Shirley Chaplin, a former nurse, were told to remove small crosses because of their employers’ uniform policy.

Gary McFarlane, a former counsellor for Relate, and Lilian Ladele, a former marriage registrar from Islington, were refused the right to opt out of performing tasks that they said conflicted with their views on homosexuality.

Only Miss Eweida, a member of the Coptic Orthodox church, won her case in Strasbourg, after the judges accepted for the first time that wearing a cross was an important expression of her Christianity.

British courts had rejected her challenge on the grounds that wearing a cross is not part of a Christian’s “core beliefs” as it is not explicitly commanded, unlike the hijab for Muslims or Sikh turbans.

Professor Trigg said the European judgment exposed double standards in British courts on what constitutes a core belief.

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