When the right to freedom of religion or belief is mentioned, the first thing that comes to mind is the right of individuals to act in accordance with conscientious beliefs, to worship (or not worship) freely, and to be able to enjoy life in society without discrimination on the basis of such beliefs. As a practical matter, however, the enjoyment of such primary religious freedom rights depends in critical ways on the legal structures available to religious communities to organize their affairs. History is replete with examples of laws which constrain individual religious practice by denying legal recognition to certain religious organizations. The old systems of special charters that antedated modern corporate structures were all too often used as means of establishing favoured religious bodies,1 and dissolution provisions could be used to reign in unpopular groups.2 Religious association laws have often been passed more as a means of controlling religious organizations than of contributing to their freedom.3In the Soviet era, obligatory state registration was often used to tighten state persecution of religion.4 Sometimes such laws have been used to establish millet or millet-like systems, such as those that existed in the Ottoman Empire, which relegate non-dominant groups to second class status (or worse).5 In all of these cases, individual religious freedom suffered to a greater or lesser extent because religious communities were denied access to legal structures which facilitated genuine religious freedom, or because the available legal structures condemned some religious communities to unequal status in the political community as a whole. This report focuses on this vital aspect of the freedom of religion: namely, the right of belief communities to acquire legal personality and access to legal entity status by means of which they can carry out the full range of their legitimate belief-related activities. Every OSCE participating State has laws and regulations dealing with the registration, recognition, or the incorporation of religious communities, religious associations, and other religiously affiliated organizations. For convenience of reference, this range of legal structures will be referred to in what follows as legal entities or juridical persons. Among other things, these laws govern the terms under which legal personality or legal entity status is acquired and maintained. The result is that the religious community acquires a status and an organizational structure that is recognized by the state for purposes of carrying out the organization's temporal affairs. Despite the fact that such laws are often similar in basic structural features, they differ widely in the way they are interpreted and administered in OSCE participating States. Such laws invariably serve both to facilitate and to control belief communities, but the degree of freedom that various belief communities experience in different countries depends critically on the rigor of the control features of such laws and the extent to which officials use these laws to restrict rather than to facilitate communities of religion or belief. With good reason, participating States in the OSCE have undertaken commitments to make entity status available to groups prepared to practice their faith within the constitutional framework of their States. In the contemporary world, while a few groups continue to object on conscientious grounds to any requirement that they obtain entity status from the state, most religious organizations view themselves as being severely restricted if they do not have the ability to obtain entity status. To cite only a few examples, without entity status, it is difficult for a religious community to acquire or rent a place to worship, to support clergy and other religious personnel, to enter into contracts for the production of church literature and other religious articles necessary for religious life, and so forth. Moreover, as noted above, history has provided all too many examples of States that have utilized registration laws to monitor and repress religious life. Both the mundane needs and the specter of more extreme abuses underscore the need for protection provided by OSCE commitments that assure that religious communities will be able to exercise their religious freedom rights through legal entities.