The Legal Status of Religious Ministers: Foreign and Russian Experience of Normative Legal Regulation

Religious ministers are among the subjects implementing the constitutional right to freedom of religion. Their status is regulated both by the “internal law” of religious associations and by the norms of the constitutional law of a particular state, which determines the complexity of the study. The aim of this paper is to make a comparative study of the most significant legislative bases of the legal status of religious ministers in fifty-seven countries. The research will allow us to verify the hypothesis about the validity of singling out the subinstitution of religious ministers within the framework of the complex constitutional legal institution of freedom of religion. For the comparative analysis, the author uses five criteria that make it possible to consider the limits of the autonomy of religious organizations with regard to the appointment of their ministers and the guarantees of securing their status: the requirement of citizenship, the binding obligation to notify the authorities of their appointment, the maintenance of registers of ministers, the peculiarities of instituting criminal proceedings with regard to the interaction with religious associations and the restrictions on their activities. The author uses formal-dogmatic and functional methods together with the comparative legal method. Conclusions are drawn on the ways of consolidating certain aspects of the status of religious ministers in regulatory legal acts and, taking into account certain comparative criteria, the options of state regulation with the most restrictive effect are determined.