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Sarah Trotter, ‘Living Together’, ‘Learning Together’, and ‘Swimming Together’: Osmanoğlu and Kocabaş v Switzerland (2017) and the Construction of Collective Life, Human Rights Law Review, Volume 18, Issue 1, March 2018, Pages 157–169, https://doi.org/10.1093/hrlr/ngx045
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1. INTRODUCTION
In recent years, the principle of ‘living together’ has emerged in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) as a possible justification for limitations on the rights to freedom of religion and to respect for private life. The principle has its roots in the submissions of the French Government in S.A.S. v France,1 a case in which the French statutory ban on covering the face in public was challenged on the grounds that it violated the rights of the Applicant to, inter alia, respect for her private life, freedom to manifest her religion or beliefs and freedom of expression, together with her right to freedom from discrimination in the exercise of these rights. The Grand Chamber of the ECtHR accepted the argument of the French Government that the prohibition pursued the objective of respect for ‘the minimum requirements of life in society’ in that it was aimed at a conception of ‘living together’ in which it was necessary and significant to see the face of the other in social interaction.2 It considered that ‘living together’ constituted an element of the protection of the rights and freedoms of others, such that it could justify the limitation on the rights of the Applicant. Thus the notion of ‘living together’ entered European human rights law; and its new-found position was most recently affirmed in two judgments concerning the Belgian equivalent of the French prohibition on covering the face in public: Belcacemi and Oussar v Belgium and Dakir v Belgium.3
