Challenges of regulating the legal status of religious organizations in Serbia and the region

Abstract

At the beginning of this century, laws regulating the status of churches and religious communities were adopted in Serbia and the countries of the region. These laws are aligned with international standards for the protection of human rights. This paper will present the most significant aspects of new legislation regulating the legal status of religious organizations in Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro. The aim is to identify similarities and differences in the proposed or implemented solutions by comparative analysis, to identify their main advantages and disadvantages, as well as to point out the possibilities of their improvement and harmonization with international standards, especially in the field of protection of the collective aspect of freedom of religion. The article consists of three parts. The first summarizes the laws on churches and religious communities in the mentioned countries with an emphasis on issues that will be analyzed separately in other parts of the paper. The second part deals with the registration of churches and religious communities and the continuity of their legal personality. The third part of the paper contains an analysis of the regulations that change and re-regulate the scope of benefits and privileges afforded to churches and religious communities by the legal order. The concluding considerations outline the results of the analysis and point out further directions for the development of regulation in the domain of state-church law.

Keywords

• religious organizations
• legal personality
• registration
• benefits