‘Living together’, ‘learning together’, and ‘swimming together’: Osmanoğlu and Kocabaş v Switzerland (2017) and the construction of collective life

In recent years, the principle of ‘living together’ has emerged in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights as a possible justification for limitations on the rights to freedom of religion and to respect for private life. This note assesses the meaning of this principle, and, in particular, the critical development in its conceptualisation marked by the recent judgment of Osmanoğlu and Kocabaş v Switzerland (2017). Although the notion of ‘living together’ is not explicitly mentioned in this case, I suggest that its ethos underlies the judgment entirely, and that what can ultimately be drawn from the reasoning of the Court in this case is a vision of ‘living together’ as consisting in ‘living in exactly the same way’.