Article 11 (freedom of assembly and association) of the European Convention on Human Rights states: ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.’ One of the longest and hardest disputes in this area is whether religious workers have the right (like any other sort of worker) to organise themselves and demand fairer treatment. In a ECHR verdict that 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 the ECHR upheld the church's point of view and said it was ‘not unreasonable’ to have stopped the union from establishing itself. The reasons cited by the court were that the Archbishop had objected to the establishment of the union and the state had no right to meddle in church business because of the constitutionally guaranteed separation of church and state. The Archbishop successfully appealed the initial decision of a lower court to register the priests’ trade union, Pastorul Cel Bun (the Good Shepherd) in 2008.
English: http://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/FS_Trade_union_ENG.pdf
http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/sites/eng ...
http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=18419
http://ukhumanrightsblog.com/2013/08/01/no-trade-unions-for-clergy-if-the-archbishop-says ...
For more information, please contact the editor Jan Cremers, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS) cbn-aias@uva.nl or the communications officer at the ETUI, Mariya Nikolova mnikolova@etui.org. For previous issues of the Collective bargaining newsletter please visit http://www.etui.org/E-Newsletters/Collective-bargaining-newsletter. You may find further information on the ETUI at www.etui.org, and on the AIAS at www.uva-aias.net.