The Belgian Buddhist Union has given the federal government until 30 September to respond to a recognition request first filed in March 2006, warning that it will otherwise pursue legal action over the delay, concerning religious freedom.

In East Flanders, special-education teacher Hadija Amajoud has been dismissed from her school in Assenede after refusing to remove the Islamic headscarf she had worn since 2022, under neutrality rules the province introduced in 2024. A separate Ghent University study, meanwhile, found that job applicants who listed volunteer work for a church or mosque scored noticeably lower with recruiters than otherwise identical candidates who volunteered for secular organisations.

Three disputes, three different mechanisms, but the same underlying pattern: Belgium’s constitution and institutions formally protect belief, yet how a religion appears, whether administratively, visually or on a CV, still determines how equally it is actually treated.

If this doesn’t amount to systematic persecution, it does suggest that formal freedom and practical equality are not automatically the same thing.

Buddhists Have Waited Twenty Years

The Belgian Buddhist Union applied for official recognition in March 2006. The wait is particularly striking because the government itself moved towards recognition years ago: in 2023, ministers approved draft legislation recognising Buddhism as a non-confessional philosophical organisation and identifying the Buddhist Union as its representative body.

The proposal passed a second government reading that December and was prepared for submission to parliament.

Yet Belgium’s own Justice Ministry still lists Buddhism as unrecognised today. Catholicism, Protestant-Evangelical Christianity, Anglicanism, Judaism, Islam and Orthodoxy all hold recognised status, while organised secularism has carried equivalent recognition since 2002, and Buddhism and Hinduism receive subsidies but remain outside the full system.

Recognition carries real weight, since it can affect public funding, institutional representation, local communities and the status of religious or philosophical representatives. A twenty-year administrative limbo therefore raises a broader question about equality, since religious freedom can exist constitutionally while the institutions surrounding it still move at radically different speeds.

A Headscarf Costs a Teacher Her Job

The problem looks very different in East Flanders. Hadija Amajoud, a special-education teacher in Assenede, has been dismissed after refusing to remove the Islamic headscarf she had worn since beginning work at the school in 2022.

The province introduced stricter neutrality rules in 2024 banning visible political, philosophical and religious symbols for staff and pupils in its educational institutions, and Amajoud later proposed wearing a neutral turban or bandana instead, but the alternatives were rejected.

Her teaching performance had reportedly been evaluated positively, and she held a permanent civil-service appointment, and her union has said it will appeal the dismissal before the Brussels Chamber of Appeal.

The dispute therefore does not concern whether she could perform the job; it concerns what neutrality requires a public employee to look like while performing it. Supporters of strict neutrality argue that public institutions must appear impartial to everybody they serve, a principle that is legally defensible when rules apply consistently to political and religious symbols alike. Yet visual neutrality and institutional neutrality are not automatically identical: a teacher can wear a religious symbol without teaching religion, and removing every visible sign of conviction does not necessarily prove impartiality any more than allowing a headscarf proves partiality.

Religion Can Hurt Before Employment Begins

New research suggests that religious identity can create difficulties even before workplace dress rules apply at all. A Ghent University experiment asked 177 professional recruiters across Belgium to evaluate fictional job candidates, generating 708 assessments while varying names, religious symbols and volunteer experience.

Applicants who listed voluntary work for a church or mosque scored 0.676 points lower on an 11-point hiring scale than otherwise similar candidates volunteering for secular organisations.

That result is interesting partly because the penalty did not significantly differ between Christian and Muslim volunteering. Recruiters also did not consider religious candidates less competent, diligent or trustworthy; instead, they appeared to worry that colleagues or customers might react badly to visibly religious workers.

Discrimination therefore operates indirectly: an employer may personally have no objection to a religious applicant but still downgrade that person because someone else might. This produces a peculiar feedback loop, since employers anticipate social discomfort, avoid the candidate, and thereby help preserve the idea that openly religious people do not naturally belong in particular workplaces.

Belgium’s Neutrality is Selective in Practice

Belgium is hardly hostile to religion. Its constitutional and institutional framework explicitly protects belief, and the state financially supports recognised religious communities; Islam itself has been formally recognised since 1974.

The friction appears when belief turns visible, administratively inconvenient or difficult to fit into an existing category.

Buddhists can practise freely yet wait decades for recognition. A Muslim teacher can be professionally competent yet lose her post over clothing, and Christian and Muslim applicants alike can face disadvantages simply because their CVs suggest active religious commitment.

Although not proving systematic persecution, these cases show that formal freedom and practical equality are not the same thing. A state can permit religion while still building institutions that reward keeping it private, and a society where non-belief looks like the only neutral identity risks turning neutrality into another worldview rather than the absence of one.

Faith Turns into Data Too

The question also extends beyond employment and recognition. A recent investigation into misuse of artificial intelligence found accounts linked to a China-based intelligence operation using AI to build dossiers on Catholic leaders, Tibetan Buddhists, Taiwanese Christians and other religious communities.

The system processed multilingual material and organised personal details, affiliations and potential pressure points into structured reports.

Belgium is obviously not China, and the comparison should not be stretched. Yet it illustrates something about modern religious identity: faith is no longer only something expressed in churches, mosques or clothing, but can also turn into a category in databases and institutional risk assessments.

That makes consistency increasingly important, since religious freedom means more than believing privately; it also means being able to organise, work and participate publicly without faith automatically turning into an administrative problem. Belgium already has strong protections on paper, and the disputes emerging now concern making those protections feel equally real once belief turns visible.

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