DOI: 10.5294/dika.2011.20.2.2 The use of the Islamic veil by girls in France has provoked an important debate about laicism, multiculturalism and religious freedom. This debate has reached the European Court of Human Rights, which has had several rulings on it. The requirement of neutrality, a fundamental principle of laicism, allows the secular State, in order to protect the freedom of conscience of non-religious people, to relieve the exercise of religious freedom to the domestic sphere and, while requiring neutrality, it intends to impose in the public sphere a sort of civil religion, by denying the right to freedom of expression in religious matters. These elements are not only in the founders and in the current representatives of laicism, but they can also now be seen in self-reliefs, which are not said to be secular, propose to relegate self-conviction to loprivy and to have a sort of civil religion at social level. The underlying fundamental mistake lies in the conception of freedom that have inherited the illustrated liberalism, an error which ultimately responds to an unallied human conception. The claims of those soundproofable positions, since religion cannot be relegated to human beings alone, and if the States assert themselves in those positions, there will be no limits on the elavilisation of individual freedoms. Therefore, instead of seeing religion as a toxic element in the social sphere, the relationship between the State and religion must be characterised by positive laicism, with legal autonomy between the two, while recognising the positive value of religion for individual and social life, at the point of establishing a human right. DOI: 10.5294/dika.2011.20.2.2