.- The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Italian public schools can continue to display crucifixes in classrooms, overturning an earlier decision that declared them to be a human rights violation.
Seventeen judges of the Grand Chamber gave the 15-2 ruling on March 18, holding that there had been “no violation of Article 2 of Protocol No. 1 (right to education) to the European Convention on Human Rights.”
The protocol requires that state schools “shall respect the right of parents to ensure … education and teaching in conformity with their own religions and philosophical convictions.”
In 2009, a lower chamber of the same court ruled that the crucifixes violated that protocol, as well as another provision guaranteeing “freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.”
However, the Grand Chamber – whose ruling is final, and not subject to appeal – disagreed.
Their decision concludes a five-year legal battle that began in 2006, when an Italian mother of two non-Catholic students complained to the court that the crucifix displays were a form of involuntary religious indoctrination.
In a summary of the Grand Chamber's March 18 ruling, Court Registrar Erik Fribergh explained that the judges had found “nothing to suggest that the authorities were intolerant of pupils who believed in other religions, were non-believers or who held non-religious philosophical convictions.”
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