The Limits of Freedom of Conscience in the Practice of the European Court of Human Rights and the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation

In this study, the author addresses the issue of mechanisms for determining the limits of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion in decisions of the judiciary. The article focuses on the essential characteristic of the limits of freedom of conscience, their relationship with related concepts (restrictions, interventions) and their significance in the application of the proportionality test by the European Court of Human Rights and the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation. The aim of this article is to identify the main approaches to determining the limits of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion and the possibility of their use in the practice of the judicial authorities of Russia. The study is based on the theoretical material of the works of domestic (A. Troitskaya, A. Dolzhikova, and others) and foreign (R. Alexy, M. Cohen-Eliya, I. Porat, J. Rivers, and others) researchers. The legislation of the Russian Federation, the decisions of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation and of the European Court of Human Rights were also used. The methodological basis of the study was dialectic, comparative legal and formal legal methods. In particular, the use of the dialectical method contributed to the study of law enforcement problems at different stages of the development of legislation on religious associations in Russia. The use of comparative legal and formal legal methods helped to identify approaches to determining the limits of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, the prospects for their use in Russia. As a result, the author comes to the conclusion that freedom of conscience is discrete and has its own structure. Its external borders unite a number of competencies in the field of choosing a belief system for evaluating one's actions, thoughts, phenomena of reality, etc., which determine the actions and activities of an individual. The powers constituting the scope of freedom of conscience could be subject to restrictions. The admissibility of their legislative introduction is checked by the judicial authorities using various methods: the principle of weighing interests, the proportionality test. In the framework of the activities of the European Court of Human Rights, the proportionality test is consistently used, which is reflected in the structure of decisions of this body. It is established that the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation uses certain elements of the proportionality test, but the mechanism is not holistically applied, which is also reflected in the texts of its decisions. It seems that this circumstance does not allow to adequately protect freedom of conscience of both people and religious associations and should be subjected to reforms.

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