Scientology and The Legal System - The Church's View

The Church's View

Scientologists say that the church's main goal is to be recognized as a religion, which on occasion has met resistance from opponents (including national governments), and this has forced it to have recourse to the courts.

Scientology's path to legal recognition as a religion in New Zealand took 48 years and several lawsuits.

Other efforts have had less success. In 1999, the United Kingdom rejected an application for charity status and the attendant tax benefits. The church applied for Canadian tax-exempt status in 1998, was reportedly rejected in 1999, and is not registered as a charity as of 2009. In Austria, the organization withdrew its application to register as a "religious confessional community".

The activities of the Church of Scientology are not prohibited or limited in any way in the European Union and Scientology enjoys the full freedom of any church in these countries. Some governments have labeled the church as a cult. Although the status is not changed or the freedom is not limited, German and Belgian government entities have accused Scientology of violating the human rights of its members and therefore called it a "totalitarian cult" and a "commercial enterprise," while a 1995 parliamentary report in France classified it, along with 172 other religious groups, as a "dangerous cult." In Russia, the government had refused to consider the church for registration as a religious organization, which became the subject of proceedings before the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Church of Scientology Moscow v. Russia. The court decided that Russia's refusal to consider the Church of Scientology's application for registration as a religious community "had been a violation of Article 11 (freedom of assembly and association) of the European Convention on Human Rights read in the light of Article 9 (freedom of thought, conscience and religion)."