WHEN people believe they are ultimately working for God, do they have a right (like any other sort of worker) to organise themselves and demand fairer treatment from their earthly bosses? That is the one of the hardest questions at the interface of law and religion, because it involves a contest between two sorts of entitlement: the right of employees to band together and assert their interests, and the right of religious bodies to enforce their own rules.
An important ruling on this subject was handed down today. Not by the 28-member European Union (whose stance on religion I discussed in another recent posting) but by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which holds sway among 47 member nations of the Council of Europe and is supposed to be a guardian of civil liberties of all kinds. The verdict concerns a dispute between Romania's Orthodox Church, to which the great majority of people in that country adhere, and a 35-strong group of priests and other religious employees who tried, in 2008, to form a trade union. To the delight of conservative religious lobby groups, today's decision (accessible here in PDF form) upheld the church's point of view and said it was "not unreasonable" to have stopped the would-be union from establishing itself.