Sharia Law in Europe?

On 18 June 2020, the European Court of Human Rights delivered a Grand Chamber judgment concerning the matter of just satisfaction (Article 41 of the European Convention on Human Rights) in the case of Molla Sali v. Greece (Application no. 20452/14). The case concerned the application by the national courts of Islamic (Sharia) law to an inheritance dispute among Greek nationals from the Muslim minority.

The case and its implications were considered in detail by Professor McGoldrick in his article ‘Sharia Law in Europe? Legacies of the Ottoman Empire and the European Convention on Human Rights’ (2019) 8 Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 517–66. In Western Thrace in Greece, a legacy of the Ottoman Empire survives in the form of religious law (Sharia).

This article examines how international human rights law has approached the compatibility of such religious laws with modern human rights instruments and particularly with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). It portrays the situation on Western Thrace within the wider historical, legal and social contexts of Muslims in Greece. It explains how the ‘Muslims in Western Thrace’ came to be identified as a particular legal minority, why Sharia continued to be applied to them and only to them, and examines their contemporary legal and human rights status.

There follows an extensive critique of the judgment of the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in Molla Sali v. Greece in December 2018. Although the narrow factual issue in the case concerned inheritance rights, the case raised general issues concerning the individual as the central subject of human rights law and the relationship between individual and minority rights protection.

The article concludes by reflecting on the place of individual consent within a human rights framework and the systemic implications of the Molla Sali case with respect to the possible future of Sharia in the social and legal spaces of the ECHR.