Spanish Court’s Preference for Secular Schooling Challenged Before the ECtHR
On 19 November 2025, the European Court of Human Rights communicated the application of a Catholic father and his daughter challenging Spain’s preference for public non-confessional schooling. Spain’s Constitutional Court had overturned decisions allowing the child to attend a Catholic chartered school, considering a non-confessional school the more “neutral” option amid the parents’ disagreement over religion.
A Catholic father and his daughter have brought a case before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) after Spain’s Constitutional Court annulled domestic decisions that had allowed the child to attend a Catholic chartered school. The ECtHR communicated D.H. and E.H. v. Spain to the Spanish Government on 19 November 2025. The application had been lodged on 19 June 2024 and remained pending when last verified on 21 September 2026.
The dispute began after the child’s parents divorced and disagreed over her education. The father wanted her to attend Sagrado Corazón-Corazonistas, a Catholic chartered school near his home, while the mother preferred a public non-confessional school near hers. On 23 July 2019, the Juzgado de Primera Instancia n.º 15 de Barcelona (Barcelona Court of First Instance No. 15) authorised the father to choose the Catholic school. It found that the school offered several practical and educational advantages, including all educational stages within the same institution, stronger language provision, swimming, wider extracurricular activities and more extensive facilities. To accommodate the mother’s convictions, the child was enrolled in an alternative activity instead of Catholic religion classes.
The Audiencia Provincial de Barcelona (Barcelona Provincial Court) upheld that solution on 21 May 2021. It found that the child was not attending religion classes and that the school’s explicitly religious extracurricular and complementary activities were voluntary. The child had attended the Catholic school from September 2019. These decisions attempted to preserve the mother’s freedom from religious instruction without excluding the father’s preferred school solely because of its Catholic identity.
The mother challenged the decisions before the Constitutional Court. In its Judgment 26/2024 of 14 February 2024, the Court held that the earlier judges had concentrated too heavily on comparing the schools’ educational provision and had not adequately addressed the conflict between the parents’ religious and non-religious convictions. It found that Catholic identity extended beyond religion classes and was present throughout the school’s educational project, teaching methods and daily environment.
The Constitutional Court concluded that, where parents hold fundamentally incompatible positions and a young child cannot yet express mature religious convictions, her education should take place in what it described as a “neutral environment”. It regarded the public non-confessional school as the option best suited to allowing the child to form her own beliefs. The Court therefore annulled the decisions of 2019 and 2021 and returned the proceedings to the first-instance court for a new ruling consistent with its judgment.
This reasoning creates a serious religious-freedom concern because it treats public non-confessional education as neutral while presenting a Catholic school as an obstacle to the child’s future freedom of belief. The earlier courts had sought a practical balance: the child could benefit from the Catholic school’s educational provision without attending religion classes, while both parents remained free to communicate their convictions outside school. By contrast, the Constitutional Court’s approach risks making the non-religious parent’s preference decisive whenever separated parents disagree about faith.
Three Constitutional Court judges dissented. They argued that the lower courts had already considered both parents’ rights and based their decision on the child’s educational interests. In their assessment, the majority did not achieve a fair balance but effectively prioritised the mother’s atheist or agnostic position. They also stressed that the child was not required to attend religion classes and that the father could not exercise his right to provide a Catholic education if religion was excluded from her school environment entirely.
Before the ECtHR, the father and daughter allege violations of their family life and religious freedom under Articles 8 and 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, discrimination based on religion under Article 14, and failure to respect the father’s educational convictions under Article 2 of Protocol No. 1. Significantly, the ECtHR has asked whether the Constitutional Court confused the State’s non-confessional character with religious neutrality and thereby interfered disproportionately with the applicants’ freedom of religion in a dispute between two private individuals.
The European Centre for Law and Justice, which was authorised to submit written observations in the case, argues that secular education is not a belief-free position and should not automatically take priority over a parent’s Catholic convictions. The ECtHR must now decide whether the Spanish authorities fairly balanced the rights of both parents and the child, or whether the Constitutional Court’s preference for non-confessional education placed the Catholic father and daughter at an unjustified disadvantage. No judgment has yet been delivered.
Source: European Court of Human Rights, European Centre for Law and Justice
Image: Patrice Audet from Pixabay