Corporate Religious Freedom and the Rights of Others

In pluralist societies, corporate religious freedom might conflict with other fundamental rights. Corporate piety might collide with LGBT rights, notably when a company’s management does not accept, either as employees or clients, individuals whom it believes to have ‘sinful’ sexual orientations. Secular companies may want to keep religion out of the workplace altogether, thus affecting individual religious freedom of employees.

In this contribution, Jeroen Temperman engages with such expressions of corporate religion, addressing among other questions whether companies may indeed be deemed ‘religious’ under international human rights standards – hence whether companies can claim religious freedom – and if so, what the scope of such a freedom is, particularly when the rights of others are affected by such corporate manifestations of religion.