Professor Savić participates in the ICLARS Conference in Palermo

From September 1 to 3, 2026, Professor Vanja-Ivan Savić from our University participated in an international conference on law and religion organized by the International Consortium for Law and Religion Studies (ICLARS), the largest academic organization dedicated to issues concerning law and religion, with a particular focus on religious freedom.

The conference was held at the University of Palermo, which co-organized the event and welcomed scholars from around the world. This year’s conference was entitled “State Neutrality and Cooperation with Religion: Protecting Freedom of Religion or Belief without Discrimination”. Professor Savić delivered a presentation entitled “Attack on ‘Unum Baptisatum, Semper Baptisatum’: Churches under Threat by European Privacy Law?”, addressing the right to privacy in light of individual requests arising from the application of GDPR provisions, as well as the right of Churches and other religious communities to preserve information contained in their registers as valuable historical and archival records that also have a public-law character.

During his visit to Sicily, Professor Savić also visited Piana degli Albanesi, one of the centres of the small Italo-Albanian Catholic Church, a Byzantine-rite sui iuris Church in full communion with the Holy See and the Roman Pontiff. Its liturgy is celebrated in liturgical Greek and Old Albanian, with Italian also being used.