The Freedom of Religion in the Russian Federation in the light of the European Court of Human Rights

Freedom of Religion has always been a very important part of our human history. Even though in the present days it has faded from the consciousness of the western society, it still remains as one of the most important human right. The Russian federation is considered to be one of the European countries and formally belongs to the democratic states. In various literature about international relations is Russia described as an authoritative state with a masculine society that is typical for the use of hard powers in order to achieve their goals. This bachelor thesis focuses on the question whether the freedom of religion is guaranteed in the territory of the Russian federation.The first part deals with the definition of the freedom of worship and in which international treates can it be found. The European court of Human Rights places it under the Article 9 on Freedom of Religion. Nevertheless, the next part focuses on the russian legislation and comments on the most important laws regulating this area. The next section dicusses the proces of the complaints againts the federation and in the chapter called "Reflexe v Rusku," there is a study of the goverment behaviour against religious churches after the end of the trial. The case study method will be used for all four cases of the religious organisations. Given the events that took place at the time of writting this thesis, I will focus more on the behaviour of the government towards the Church of Scientology and the Jehovahs Witnesses.To complete the whole Picture of this work, I will create a table for the comparison between the churches and a table with the most significant russian laws and their violation/non-aplication by the goverment.Most of the resources of this work are written in English and the main resource for the individual cases were taken from the databese of the European court of Human Rights called HUDOC.