This UK case from the Employment Appeal Tribunal (the equivalent of the Labour Court in Ireland) will be of particular interest to those readers who specialise in employment equality matters, given its focus on potential indirect discrimination claimed by an employee who wished time off at a specific time each year to attend religious festivals in his homeland.

The claimant is a practising Roman Catholic from Sardinia in Italy.  He lives in the UK with his wife and family, but each August he and his two brothers return to the area of Sardinia where their mother continues to live in order to be together and to attend religious festivals.

He is entitled to 38 days’ holiday per year (including Bank Holidays) and between 2009 and 2013 the Respondent permitted him to take five consecutive weeks of annual leave in the summer during which he returned to Sardinia.  In March 2013 a new manager, Mr Cross, told him that for the next year he would not be permitted to take five weeks’ continuous leave and that it was unlikely that he would be granted more than 15 continuous working days of leave during the summer school holiday period.

Although in fact ultimately pre-existing arrangements he had made for a five-week holiday in 2014 were honoured, his application for annual leave of five weeks in 2015, from 27 July to 2 September, was refused by the Respondent. The claimant argued that the new condition was indirect discrimination on grounds of his religious belief.

The original employment tribunal found that the claimant's assertion that attending the festivals over a five week period was a requirement of his religious belief was not made in good faith, in large part because he did not attend all 17 festivals held in the period - the ones he attended were in large part subject to family discussion (in 2013 he attended 9 festivals). Whilst both the Respondent and the Tribunal accepted that participation in religious festivals might constitute a manifestation of religious belief, it was the assertion of a specific five-week period in which to attend a series of religious festivals that resulted in the Tribunal’s finding.

The UK EAT has upheld the employment tribunal's decision:

"The mere fact that attendance at a single festival is a genuine manifestation of religious belief does not inevitably mean that attendance for a five-week period to do so is also a genuine manifestation.  To take the example given by Mr Jones [Counsel for the employee] of the person who enjoys church for mixed reasons and to bring it closer to the facts of this case: if a churchgoing family man asserts that he requires a whole weekend off work to attend church with his family but in truth only attends church on Sunday and goes shopping with his family on Saturday, the fact that his assertion is partly true (in relation to his Sunday attendance) does not prevent a tribunal from determining whether his asserted requirement for a whole weekend off work in order to manifest his religious belief is a genuine one."

By way of further explanation, the EAT continued:

"There is nothing in the Decision to suggest that the Tribunal held against the Claimant, in any sense, his desire to worship collectively with his family.  What the Tribunal did is test the genuineness of his assertion that he was required to do so over a period of five weeks in August.  Whilst, as I have already indicated, the Tribunal accepted that participation in religious festivals may constitute a manifestation and that attendance at particular festivals as a manifestation could be in good faith, what it did not accept (on the facts of this case) is that this was required to be for a period of five weeks over August.  It was the assertion of the specific five-week period that gave rise to a question as to the genuineness of the underlying belief or manifestation, and it was this aspect that the Tribunal determined was as a result of a desire to be with family and related to family arrangements and not to any religious beliefs or their manifestation."
http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKEAT/2016/0086_16_1512.html