Abstract

How governments recognise and register religious groups is a reasonable concern to those monitoring human rights records, given how often recognition and registration
policies discriminate based on religion or belief. This thesis identifies the frequency, severity and variety of recognition and registration issues across diverse cultural, political and religious contexts. Using case studies, it develops ways of measuring the degree to which recognition and registration issues impact conditions of freedom of religion or belief (FoRB). It concludes that recognition and registration play a significant role in limiting or interfering with the freedom of religious communities.

The findings presented in this thesis stem from a series of interviews conducted with members of minority religions and human rights professionals. The participants explained what recognition and registration issues they believe are most pressing. The issues that participants considered crucial were states limiting access to legal personality, criminalising unregistered religious activity, making registration onerous, using information gathered during registration to surveil religious services and deregistering groups if they fail to conform to state regulations. The thesis analyses the interplay between recognition and registration and explores the extent to which recognition policy influences how groups fare before, during and after they have registered. State recognition appears to be a permanent fixture in state-religion relations. It also tends to worsen the impacts of registration due to the widespread practice of states giving special privileges to favoured denominations. Although registration has a legitimate function in regulating groups that are fraudulent or harmful, how registration policies are developed and applied is often not conducive to pluralism, especially if there is a narrow recognition policy that prevents communities from registering. Although the study finds the most drastic impacts to appear in authoritarian states, recognition and registration systems in democracies are not free
of inequality and prejudice. The thesis synthesises various dimensions of FoRB by introducing the Spectrum of Religious Recognition (SRR-1), the Spectrum of Religious Registration (SRR-2) and the Scale of Rights Violations (SRV). Each can be used to rank countries on how severely their practices impact conditions of FoRB.