Benoît CHALLAND - Marie Curie Fellow, European University Institute, Florence, Italy

In a world whose social, political, and economic features are increasingly intertwined with one another, it is also increasingly illusionary to conceive of ‘politics’ as framed uniquely within the limits of ‘sovereign’ states, or of religions as closed entities. Instead, one should adopt so to say a ‘higher’ level of analysis to understand some of the challenges that our societies are facing nowadays. The purpose of this paper is precisely to try to understand some of the legal changes in the sphere of religion that take place in Europe and to highlight some of the dynamics on two different levels, namely the impact that such changes on the European level have for EU member states and for larger entities that neighbour Europe, in particular the Middle East, host to widely Muslim majority political systems. (The question of Turkey’s accession to the EU as well as all of the turmoil that mars political life in the region make of the Middle East a central point of enquiry for our paper). To tie legal changes to the study of religion, this article looks at the evolution of the questions of human rights and its religious dimensions, both in the European and the Middle Eastern civilizational constellations. In particular, it argues that religion plays an always greater role not only in politics and in the public sphere, but also in shaping arguments around human rights.