Cztery lekcje z czasu pandemii COVID-19 dla ograniczania wolności uzewnętrzniania religii w Polsce
Four lessons for limiting the freedom to manifest religion from the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland

Summary/Abstract: The unforeseen crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic and the related unprecedented restrictions have led to scholarly debate on the limits of commonly guaranteed freedoms and rights. This article discusses the issues raised in the literature regarding the restrictions imposed by authorities on the freedom to manifest religion during the pandemic and relates them to Polish legislation, drawing four lessons to prevent similar problems in the future. The first lesson is the need to re-establish a proper understanding of the sphere of religious autonomy and to reconsider the division of powers in regulating religious practices in order to prevent a repeat of the mistakes that were made during the pandemic. The second lesson pertains to the need to legislate transparently and provide a clear explanation of the restrictions to avoid the criticisms of arbitrariness and inconsistency that have been levelled at the COVID-19 containment policy. The third lesson is that the restrictions should be framed in the context of a broader policy and with particular attention to the equal treatment of religious and secular activities. This lesson results from an analysis of the doubts about whether the pandemic regulations were discriminatory. The fourth lesson introduces a new model for restricting the freedom to manifest religion, which is based on cooperation with religious organisations and aims to identify proportionate measures to avoid the problems that occurred in the last pandemic.

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