Convention Rights on the Altar of Secularism

George Balgobin is a sociologist who lives in Chicago and works with mixed methods on crime, criminology, and mass incarceration. He has presented at conferences from London to Singapore. He has engaged in field work and ethnography as well as statistical analysis.His work focuses on how political polarization interacts with the way in which policy decisions are made and the cascading effect this has in individuals' daily lives. This book is about the Leyla Sahin case, which involved a Turkish medical student’s challenge to a ban on wearing the Muslim headscarf at university. The rights to free expression and to manifest one’s religion are embodied in the European Convention on Human Rights. Turkey sought, successfully in this case, to restrict these rights on the supposition that symbols of Islam pose a threat to democratic values.