The health emergency caused by the contagious virus SARS-CoV-2 is having many consequences also on religious rules – more broadly for the difficulties raising from the possible contradiction between the respect for the measures taken by civil authorities and religious rules. International law allows for the limitation? of the right to religious freedom on the grounds of protection of public health, and we are witnessing a situation of unprecedented restrictions on the global scale.
As scholars engaged in the study of the legal regulation of the religious phenomenon, we decided to create a web space to collect documents, comments and other useful materials related to the Covid-19 emergency, in order to assess the outcomes of the normative decisions made by state and religious authorities. So, on March 8th we have created http://www.diresom.net. By the end of April, we had already published more than 500 documents and comments related to this issue, and more than 20.000 unique visitors had surfed our website. Therefore, we decide to edit an open source book to share in a more orderly way the comments that we have already published online, thus giving the possibility to consult these first guidelines to all those who want to study or analyze the legal reaction, both state and religious, to this pandemic.