Freedom of conscience and forced compliance with the law

Abstract

As Education is a right and a duty that the State must offer free of charge, it is the State’s responsibility to guarantee that everyone receives it, at least at the basic level. However, in the Government’s exercising of the educational competences that pertain to it by law, the new subject matter of Education for Citizenship has been configured in Spain in the regulations as the instrument of a far-reaching ideological and cultural project that imposes a common ethics deriving from positive law that goes beyond constitutional values and human rights. In this case a conflict is posed between obligatory compliance with the law and the necessary defence and protection of the fundamental rights of ideological and religious freedom as well as of freedom of conscience, and the right of parents to decide how their children should be educated morally in line with their own convictions, as limits to the educational action of the public authorities.