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"The Status of Minor Religious Communities in Croatia: A Revival of Legal Pluralism"

The status of minor religious communities in Croatia includes at least four intertwined but analytically distinct dimensions or elementary problems. The most obvious is the problem of content. It may be stated by the following question: What are the rights and duties of a minor religious community in Croatia? A civil servant and even a government official is likely to see rights and duties of a minor religious community (e.g. when considering the request of for a building permit or custom exemption) as a matter of mere administration of legal sources, whatever they may be. Hence, at a cost of oversimplification, the problem of content may be labelled administrative. The second problem, if seen in terms of (subjective) rights and duties, is the (in)equality of religious communities ; if seen in terms of (objective)law, it is the regime governing religious communities. It may be formulated by a multiple question that runs roughly as follows: What is the difference, if any, between the rights and duties of, first, a religious group, be it incorporated or not, under Croatian general laws ; secondly, a religious community under the Croatian Law on Legal Position of Religious Communities of 2002 ; thirdly, a minor religious community under the contract that the religious community has made with the Government of Croatia in 2003 on the basis of the Law of 2002 ; the Catholic Church under the treaties between the Holy See and the Republic of Croatia of 1996-98 ; the Catholic Church under a contract the Catholic Church has made with the Government of Croatia on the basis of the treaties of 1996-98? This is how the status of minor religious communities in Croatia is seen by a constitutional lawyer, especially a human and/or civil rights lawyer. The third problem is the function of contracts between minor religious communities and the Government of the Republic of Croatia of 2003. Indeed, what is it that the contracts achieve, while the Law on Legal Position of Religious Communities of 2002 does not or could not achieve? How the contracts differ in terms of functions from the treaties between the Holy See and the Republic of Croatia? Concern with functions of legal institutes, i.e. with unintended as well as intended consequences, both legal and extralegal, of legal norms, values, procedures, corporations, etc., is now a stock-in-trade of ordinary legal analysis. However, it was originally a distinct contribution of sociological jurisprudence to modern legal thought. The fourth problem is the membership of the rights and duties of a religious community in Croatia in a legal system. Does the regime governing, i.e. the (objective) law implying, rights and duties of religious communities in Croatia consist of a single legal system or of two legal systems (e.g. the international, governing the Catholic Church, and the Croatian, governing all the minor religious communities), or of several legal systems (each governing a single religious community or a group of religious communities governed by the same contract)? Assuming that a concrete legal system, e.g. Croatian or international, as well as the legal system as an abstract entity, is the privileged subject-matter of legal theory, the fourth problem is legal-theoretical or, to put it elegantly (though not quite accurately), jurisprudential. The main part of this paper is concerned primarily with the problems of (in)equality, function and membership. The paper deals with the problem of content only to the extent that it provides a sample of evidence necessary for the performance of constitutional and jurisprudential tasks. Section 1 sketches conditions that have given rise to the problems. Section 2 classifies religious communities in Croatia, describes briefly the content of principal sources that regulate them, and compares provisions of the sources on teaching religious doctrine. The comparison should indicate both the content of an important set of religious rights and constitutional (in)equalities between religious communities. Sections 3 & 4 attempt to discover the function and membership of the rights and duties of minor religious communities in legal systems, suggesting that the sources of, and inequalities between, rights and duties of religious communities in Croatia are important building blocks, or at least signs, of the current revival of legal pluralism.

church and state, legal pluralism, minor religious communities, Croatia

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