The annual conference of CUREDI—Cultural and Religious Diversity under State Law across Europe—took place 26–28 November 2025 at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology . The meeting brought together academic partners, judges, and legal practitioners from across Europe, combining the project’s regular scholarly exchange with a celebratory launch of the CUREDI database.
CUREDI is an online, collaborative database that provides analyses of domestic case law relating to questions of cultural and religious diversity across a wide range of legal fields. Established by Department ‘Law & Anthropology’, under the direction of Professor Dr Marie-Claire Foblets, the project is developed through a network of academic contributors across Europe, facilitating comparative engagement with judicial practice and serving as a shared point of reference for scholars and practitioners alike.
The opening afternoon featured a keynote by Wojciech Postulski, a judge and Team Leader for Judicial Training at the Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers of the European Commission. His address situated judicial engagement with cultural and religious diversity within wider debates on digital transformation in justice systems. He argued that Europe’s digital transition ‘must be not only a driver of efficiency … but also should be a neighbour of inclusion’, emphasizing that digital justice ‘is not only a technological project, it’s a human-centred project’. He further observed that disputes involving different cultural and religious frames are ‘the everyday realities in our courts’, rather than marginal or exceptional cases.
Respondents welcomed this perspective while engaging in constructive exchange, signalling, for example, that artificial intelligence may reproduce or obscure existing forms of discrimination and questioning whether current digital interpretation tools are capable of adequately capturing cultural meaning and context in courtroom settings.
The subsequent two days were dedicated to thematic panels and workshops examining judicial approaches across fields including family law, freedom of religion, and freedom of expression. A particular highlight was a session on collaboration and good practice among legal databases, which prompted comparative reflection on methodological choices, data standards, and long-term sustainability.
The conference reaffirmed CUREDI’s role as a forum for sustained comparative dialogue while situating the project’s impact within ongoing debates on how courts across Europe address cultural and religious diversity. Further details on the CUREDI database and its ongoing development are available on the project’s website: https://www.curedi-law.de