Chapter 5 focuses on cases in which States have restricted the activities of individuals or communities due to concerns about religiously motivated harm. Firstly, it explores cases concerning sexual relations with minors, corporal punishment of children, compulsory vaccination refusal, and ceremonial use of illegal substances. These are the kinds of cases one would expect fall into the outermost circle in the loose concentric circles model, where there is weakest forum internum relevance and strongest countervailing factors and, thus a very low degree of forum internum protection. This chapter seeks to demonstrate that the ECtHR’s approach in such cases is as expected. Secondly, through an analysis of cases concerning allegations of threats to national security, challenges to rights and freedoms of members, and transgressions of health and safety laws, this chapter also aims to show that where the ECtHR considers the harm in question is not substantiated, or State actions are disproportionate, the ECtHR can, and does, give greater weight to forum internum relevance than to countervailing factors, and offer a higher degree of protection.

Chapter Four revisits the controversial issue of sexual assault of female sent-down youth. Archival records make it clear that the compilation of statistics and the investigation of sexual misconduct were part of a campaign triggered by a state directive in 1973 concerning “harm to sent-down youth,” a campaign that pressured local officials to identify, expose, and investigate locals who had romantic relations with female sent-down youth, and punish individuals found guilty of sexual assault. This was not limited to rape, but included a range of behaviors and relationships previously deemed inappropriate and now classified as criminal: seduction, adultery, and molestation as well as flirting, dating, and affairs. Regardless of what type of intimacy was the basis of accusation and investigation, in almost every case individuals found to be guilty perpetrators of abuse were local men, and those they abused were urban women. Male sent-down youth who engaged in similar intimacies with fellow sent-down youth or local women were exempted from the investigations, as were local men who engaged in such intimacies with rural women.