Challenges of being an atheist in India India is a country with secular polity with right to religious freedom but a highly religious society. This might be affecting laws and policies of the governments. The stratification in and the structure of Indian society (broadly) definitely poses social challenges against atheists. Are there any significant challenges and disadvantages of being an atheist in India in legal aspects?
The most important aspects in India which are governed by specific religious laws are: Marriage Inheritance Marriage It is easier and faster to get married using the religious laws (Hindu Marriage Act or Shariat Act), as compared to the secular marriage law (Special Marriage Act, 1954). That is why many young couples convert to a single religion to get married quickly. Inheritance If one's ancestors identified with a specific religion, and one identifies with another religion, then that could affect one's inheritance. The inheritance of a person, especially a woman, could also be affected by them marrying outside their religion or state. So, if one decides to become the first generation atheist in a family (against the wishes of the family or the larger religious community), their inheritance and their rights (especially if they are engaged in agriculture) could be severely affected. This becomes all the more difficult, if the business of their family is not incorporated as a company under the Companies Act. If you are professional or a first generation business owner, then you shouldn't have legal challenges but primary and secondary social challenges. Primary social challenges could be people not ready to deal with you or engage with you if you declare publicly that you are an atheist. Secondary social challenges, would be to be able to find a lawyer (in your town and whose services are affordable) who can address these challenges. And in case you go to court, the judge may not have a lot of experience or education about how to deal with atheist cases. Also, most lawyers will advise you to identify yourself as a member of a religion to avoid unnecessary legal hassle.
Contact the local affiliate of the ACLU: Affiliates | American Civil Liberties Union. They have a long history of protecting schools and public institutions from religious influences. They will be able to determine the legality of the displays in the school and if the subject of the presentation by the speaker is legally problematic, and will know the correct approach to the school board and school district and their legal representatives. See Religion and Public Schools | American Civil Liberties Union: Dating back to the Bible Riots of the mid-1800s, the role of religion in public schools has been one of the most hotly disputed—and most frequently misunderstood—religious freedom issues in America. Even though the U.S. Supreme Court has long made clear that the Constitution prohibits public school-sponsored prayer or religious indoctrination, violations remain rampant in many parts of the country. The ACLU can protect your identity. Or, use a throwaway email from Yahoo or similar service, or use *67 to block caller ID when phoning. If for some reason the ACLU finds little they can legally do, and if your local newspaper(s) or TV station(s) are not politically conservative, contact them and see if they want to cover the situation.
Germany would not extradite to Saudi Arabia. India and Kuwait might, because they and a few other countries have extradition treaties with KSA. To put this squarely in the realm of illegal (it's not clear that accidentally encountering Shiite material online is a crime in KSA), assume that the person deliberately watched porn then fled to India. Generally speaking, this is a severe enough offense to allow extradition under the India-KSA treaty. However, India gets to review the request for exceptions. Under article 3, the central question is whether this is a political crime. There are enumerated acts that are not deemed to be political. Watching porn is not a listed exception. Accordingly, India could determine that this is a political crime, and refuse to extradite. If the crime is advocating atheism, however, then under Article 3 (1)(j), this is presumably not an excludable offense, because atheism is officially terrorism in KSA per Royal Decree 44 (I can't find an official copy). On the third hand, India may still reserve the right to apply their definition of terrorism. Even if there were an extradition treaty between Germany and KSA, German law Act on International Cooperation in Criminal Matters of 23 December 1982 §3(1) would currently preclude extradition because Extradition shall not be granted unless the offence is an unlawful act under German law or unless mutatis mutandis the offence would also constitute an offence under German law. There might be acts that are offenses in both countries, but not e.g. "watching porn" or "advocating atheism". The boundaries of blasphemy under German law are not clear to me. Section 166 of the Strafgesetzbuch imposes a maximum of 3 years in prison for blasphemy, so it could be an extraditable offense. Sect. 6 of the "Cooperation" law also sets forth exclusions for reasons of political and religious persecution. Also, KSA would have to assure Germany that the death penalty would not be imposed.
I think you misunderstand some of the relationships between laws, decisions, and justifications, and you're conflating two separate areas of jurisprudence. The linked real-world example you provide is happening in the employment context, but also in a government context (since it is a public school). But all the examples in your list have nothing to do with employment law and would be purely statutory/regulatory prohibitions. I will attempt to answer broadly enough to cover both domains. Laws and regulations can be challenged as discriminatory The things you have listed under &quot;decency law&quot; would be criminal or regulatory matters. A preliminary question would be whether the laws as written even capture the behaviours you've described. To the extent that they result in discrimination, the laws could be challenged as breaches of s. 15 (right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. There may be other Charter arguments too, if the laws affect expression or life, liberty, or the security of the person. (Public decency / nudity laws are more frequently challenged on grounds of free expression.) Decisions of school boards are subject to the Charter The Charter almost certainly applies to decisions of public school boards and schools. See Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario v. York Region District School Board, 2022 ONCA 476, paras. 39-41. These decisions could be challenged by judicial review (i.e. court review of an administrative decision-maker's decisions) and would be analyzed for reasonableness, including whether the decision strikes a proportionate balance between the Charter right and the statutory objectives (Doré v. Barreau du Québec, 2012 SCC 12). Even if there is an infringement, the government gets a chance to justify it If you're looking for some sort of a &quot;line&quot; it is found in the justification or reasonableness analysis. Where a law or regulation is challenged, and if a breach of s. 15 is established, then the onus is on the government to justify the breach as a reasonable limit as allowed by s. 1 of the Charter. This will depend on the importance of the government objective, whether there is a rational connection between the objective and the law, whether the law is minimally impairing, and whether the impact on the claimant is proportional to the salutary effects of the law. When a court reviews an administrative decision for reasonableness, it is &quot;engaged in balancing somewhat different but related considerations, namely, has the decision-maker disproportionately, and therefore unreasonably, limited a Charter right. In both cases, we are looking for whether there is an appropriate balance between rights and objectives, and the purpose of both exercises is to ensure that the rights at issue are not unreasonably limited&quot; (Doré, para. 6). In each of your examples, the judgments would be highly fact-based and it is fruitless to speculate about what the evidence might show. Relevance of association with minors You ask whether it would matter &quot;if the person in question was primarily associating with minors.&quot; This likely would not matter if a law was challenged, because such challenges are about the validity of the law, not the factors that might render its applicability to a particular person to be more or less justified. But if the law itself had the purpose of protecting children, or if the law itself was targetted solely at those associating with minors or those in positions of authority over minors, this would be a factor weighing in favour of justification of the infringing law (Irwin Toy, R. v. Sharpe). Whether the person in question was primarily associating with minors would matter in the context of an administrative decision, because these decisions are case-specific. Some anti-discrimination statutes provide more protections Ontario's Human Rights Code potentially contains even further protections. Section 5 says that every person has a right to equal treatment with respect to employment without discrimination because of sex, gender identity, gender expression, and other enumerated factors. Section 24 provides for exceptions to that right in educational settings (and some others) where what would otherwise be discrimination is actually a bona fide qualification of the employment and if it cannot be accommodated without undue hardship on the employer. These judgments are also highly fact-based and it would be fruitless to speculate about what the evidence might show.
The 1949 constitution is here. The wording has not changes in any material fashion that impinges on religion, and there is no specific mention of hijab or other items of apparel. However, it is not trivial to mention the provision in Art. 25(2)(b), which is still valid, that &quot;The wearing and carrying of kirpans shall be deemed to be included in the profession of the Sikh religion&quot;. There is a legal principle to the effect that if you say one thing and don't say another, you can infer that it was not intended to include the other. Given an opportunity to also explicitly constitutionally include the hijab as a &quot;profession of the Muslim religion&quot;, and the fact that it was not so included, the courts would concludes that there is a stark difference between the kirpan and the hijab. There have been various tweaks to the wording of provisions related to religion since the original version, but none that would affect how the courts would interpret this case. The Karnataka ruling discusses the concept of &quot;religion&quot; versus &quot;culture&quot; (proffering the decidedly Hindu-centric view that &quot;religion&quot; is &quot;dharma&quot;), and they posit w.r.t. the hijab that &quot;At the most the practice of wearing this apparel may have something to do with culture but certainly not with religion&quot;. In other words, the words of the constitution don't tell you what status the hijab has.
Legally speaking, very many nations grant asylum, and religious persecution is one of the most basic grounds for granting asylum, following the 1951 Refugee Convention. This newspaper article compares asylum statistics in Ireland versus other parts of Europe. The Irish immigration authorities spell out the details for an asylum application. Note that you must already be in Ireland, to apply for asylum in Ireland (you should apply when you enter the country). One could also apply to Norway (almost an English-speaking country), but again you have to be in Norway to do so. There is a generic solution to the "what if I'm not in country" problem via the UNHCR, which can propose resettlement into various countries. I need to add that getting a visitor's visa from certain countries can be extremely difficult. To take an example, Norway (which is fairly open to refugees) is pretty up-front on the chances of getting a visa, based on country. To take a random example, they are not very optimistic about visitor's visas from Iran, and they say "we consider how probable it is that you will return to your home country or the country you live in when the visit is over. We consider the situation in your country and your own situation", "If we believe that it is unlikely that you will return, your application will normally be rejected" and "If you plan to visit Norway as a tourist, you will normally not be granted a visa". This is the fundamental problem that refugees face, the problem of getting there. One country that allows visa-free admission from Iran is Turkey. This guide (which is in Farsi so I can't comment on) provides practical information on the UNHCR asylum process "the political asylum process for Iranians in Turkey": that may indicate that apostasy is a different matter. Other evidence suggests that this option is worse than staying put. Only for the sake of discussion, Svalbard is a theoretical possibility. Svalbard (next to the North Pole) is part of Norway, but Norway treats it as being somewhat outside of Norway. It is outside the Schengen visa area, and it is a visa-free zone, meaning that nobody requires a visa to visit or live there. This is due to the Svalbard Treaty whereby Norwegians and treaty nationals have equal rights to the islands, and while most nations are not treaty signatories, it has been policy to extend those rights to everybody. The Governor does have the power to expel anyone who is a burden on local society (e.g. unemployable). Normally one would have to get a Schengen area visa to get there, which would be an obstacle, but it is apparently possible to get a same-day visa-free transit at Oslo Airport, if travelling non-stop to Svalbard (I cannot find a definitive policy statement on this matter, but I also am not sure where exactly to look). There are some air routes from outside Schengen where the first Schengen stop is Oslo. The Governor's office gives appropriate warnings about local problems (ridiculous prices, housing shortage, work shortage, more polar bears than people, really cold).
The first thing to note is that your question is kind of the wrong way around. US states are sovereign and generally have the ability to make any kind of laws they want, unless they violate some specific tenet of federal law or the US Constitution. You suggest, for instance, that arguments which are "culturally founded" have no place in the law, but that's just your opinion, and there isn't generally anything preventing a state from making law based on such things, should its elected legislature see fit to do so. (Indeed, one could argue that nearly all laws are in some sense "culturally founded", since they are based on some notion of what kind of behavior is or is not appropriate, and those tend to be culturally based.) So legally speaking, the states aren't, by default, obligated to give any sort of justification for the laws they made. The burden of proof is on the other side. Someone seeking to overturn those laws would have to convince a court that the laws violated some specific provision of the Constitution (or another superior law). If they couldn't convince a court of this, the law would stand. From what I have read, before the US Supreme Court's 2015 legalization of same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges, the previous precedent was set in 1971 by the Minnesota Supreme Court in Baker v. Nelson. The decision itself is quite short and is worthwhile to read. Quoting Wikipedia's summary, the plaintiffs claimed that Minnesota's restriction of marriage to opposite-sex couples violated several provisions of the US Constitution: First Amendment (freedom of speech and of association), Eighth Amendment (cruel and unusual punishment), Ninth Amendment (unenumerated right to privacy), and Fourteenth Amendment (fundamental right to marry under the Due Process Clause and sex discrimination contrary to the Equal Protection Clause). The Minnesota court determined that none of the plaintiffs' objections were valid. Again, I'll refer you to the decision for the details, but the court mainly focused on their Fourteenth Amendment arguments (the others may have been addressed by the trial court, whose opinion I can't find online). They wrote: The equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, like the due process clause, is not offended by the state's classification of persons authorized to marry. There is no irrational or invidious discrimination. They specifically rejected any analogy to bans on interracial marriage, which had been held unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia: But in commonsense and in a constitutional sense, there is a clear distinction between a marital restriction based merely upon race and one based upon the fundamental difference in sex. Baker appealed to the US Supreme Court, but his appeal was dismissed "for want of a substantial federal question," without any further explanation. (Nobody quite seems to understand what they meant by that, but here is an essay discussing the situation in a little more depth.) The effect of the dismissal was that the Minnesota court's decision became binding precedent upon the whole nation - laws against same-sex marriage didn't violate those provisions of the Constitution. And that was how matters stood for 44 years until Obergefell. (Of course, there was nothing to stop individual states from deciding to allow same-sex marriage, and some in fact did so in the meantime.) You have suggested that laws against same-sex marriage were religiously motivated. This might suggest an argument that they would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The plaintiffs in Baker didn't raise that point, so it wasn't considered in the Minnesota court's opinion. I don't know whether any other courts have considered it; no such argument was mentioned in the opinion in Obergefell.
This is roughly accurate, but there are nuances. The real US issue with teacher-led prayer is that a teacher's authority can make it effectively coercive, or seem so, even if this is not intended by the teacher. (And in the past it has often been so intended, by teachers and administrators who thought it was good for children to be required to engage in prayer.) There is no ban on a teacher praying privately. Similarly, there is no ban on private prayer by a student. Indeed such a ban (for either teacher or student) might violate the free-exercise clause of the US constitution. Of course a student should not be engaged in prayer when s/he is supposed to be doing classwork, but there are times during the school day available for prayer. However, public, student-led prayer can also be an issue. For example, at some schools it was customary to have such public prayer at the start of football games, or school assemblies. This official designation of a moment or occasion for prayer was challenged as an endorsement of prayer by the school, and as coercive to those who did no want to participate, but might feel strong social pressure to do so. The point is that the school, as an aspect of government, and one where students are required to attend at that, should not make prayer an expected norm, resulting in singling out those who do not conform. But no US law or court decision has ever forbidden private prayer in schools by students, or indeed by teachers.