Living Together v. Living Well Together: A Normative Examination of the SAS Case

Abstract

The European Court of Human Rights decision in SAS from France illustrates how a policy and national mantra that ostensibly aims to enhance inclusiveness, 'living together', is legally deployed in a manner that may have the opposite effect. In essence, despite acknowledging the sincerity of SAS's religious practice of wearing the niqab, and her agency in making the decision to do so, the Court focuses on radicalism and women's oppression amongst Muslims. Taking the notion of living together as the beginning point, the paper explores the normative assumptions underlying this notion as illustrated in the judgment of the Court. An alternative approach, drawing on the work of Derrida for the notion of 'living well together' will be proposed and its implications for social inclusion explicated. The paper's aim is to move beyond the specific example of SAS and France to argue that the SAS pattern of identifying particular values as 'national values', the deployment of those values through law, policy and public discourse, and their exclusionary effects is playing out in a number of Western democracies, including Canada, the country with which the author is most familiar. Because of this widespread dissemination of values and their framing as representative of who 'we' are, there is a pressing need to consider the potentially alienating effects of a specific manifestation of 'living together' and an alternative model of 'living well together'.

Formalizing Secularism as a Regime of Restrictions and Protections: The Case of Quebec (Canada) and Geneva (Switzerland)

“…Analyzing this argument is particularly noteworthy since it has not been the subject of much scholarly attention. So far, researchers have focused on a number of other arguments used to justify restrictions, including those related to the promotion of gender equality (e.g., Scott 2007;Selby 2014), living together (Beaman 2016), and "proper" integration (Bakht 2020).…”

“…step to calm these anxieties. This governance becomes essential to ensure the preservation of both Geneva's founding value of "religious peace" 26 and Quebec's distinct way of "living together" (see Beaman 2016 and.…”

Gazing into the World of Tattoos: An Invitation to Reconsider how we Conceptualize Religious Practices

“… 17. In the SAS vs France decision at the European Court of Human Rights (2014), the applicant SAS explained that she wears the niqab “when the mood strikes.” This statement, Lori Beaman (2016: 6) notes, “signals a disjuncture between religion as it is lived and as it is often imagined.” In this case, SAS’s commitment to her religious practice is deeply influenced by her everyday life and might appear to lack coherence to the outside observer. While this flexible dimension raises doubts about the sincerity of the believer or the ‘seriousness’ of her belief, a lived-religion approach reveals that religious practices are inherently fluid, individualized, variable, and not necessarily coherent with religious texts (Beaman, 2016: 6). Thus, these dimensions do not preclude the fact that practitioners are sincere or that their practices are important to them. …”