ORFECT (Observatory on Religious Freedom in the Jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights) is both an international scholarly network—bringing together over 40 professors, researchers, and doctoral candidates across Europe—and an interdepartmental research center of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, jointly coordinated by the Department of Law, the Department of Education and Human Sciences, and the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Studies. Its core mission is to foster interdisciplinary research and institutional cooperation on freedom of religion or belief (FoRB), understood not merely as an individual right, but as a relational and culturally embedded phenomenon.
A distinctive feature of ORFECT is its capacity to integrate legal expertise, educational theory, cultural semiotics, and philosophical inquiry into a common space of reflection on the juridical significance of religion in contemporary plural societies. From this vantage point, the Center explores the dynamic interplay between religious practices and legal norms, secularism and public space, minority rights and democratic cohesion, with particular attention to the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and to broader developments within the Council of Europe.
While originally conceived as a forum for monitoring and interpreting ECtHR decisions on religious freedom, ORFECT has progressively broadened its scope to embrace a wider set of themes at the crossroads of law, intercultural translation, and symbolic pluralism. The Center promotes research on religious freedom in relation to artificial intelligence, gender identity, privacy, criminal law, interfaith dialogue, radicalization, and the legal status of worship spaces—always with an eye to the cognitive, sensory, and ritual dimensions of religion as they manifest in shared normative spaces.
Committed to translating academic insights into institutional practice, ORFECT engages in legal clinics, training programs, research partnerships with public and private actors, and the organization of conferences and seminars. Its activities aim to support the construction of a culture of non-discrimination and equal dignity, while offering normative recommendations and interpretive tools for ongoing and future legal disputes concerning FoRB in multicultural contexts.
ORFECT also pursues the development of archival and bibliographic resources, supports third-party commissioned studies, and serves as an academic anchor point for scholars interested in themes such as:
Plural family models, secularism, and religion;
Criminal law and the protection of religious sentiment;
Religious freedom in the age of artificial intelligence;
Gender identity and faith-based norms;
Privacy and religious self-determination;
Legal protection of religious minorities and places of worship;
Religion, health policies, and freedom of worship;
Interreligious dialogue and de-radicalization;
State-confession relations and their legal models.
ORFECT embodies the idea that religion, law, and culture must be studied in their mutual entanglements, and that justice in secular societies depends not only on neutrality, but also on the legal capacity to interpret and regulate diversity in all its expressive, symbolic, and epistemic forms.