Audit rules designed to protect the EU budget can collide head-on with “faith-breaker” clauses that ask bidders or applicants to renounce a religious practice to access work, grants, or contracts.
When a public authority makes access to a contract, job, or subsidy conditional on a declaration about personal belief or religious practice, the issue is not only constitutional or human-rights related—it can also become an EU budget problem. Under EU cohesion-policy rules, programmes must comply with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and maintain effective procurement oversight. If auditors find discriminatory tender conditions, spending may be treated as “irregular”, triggering repayment demands, payment suspensions, or flat-rate financial corrections. In the most serious cases, EU funding rules also allow exclusion mechanisms for entities responsible for grave misconduct.
A clause that reaches beyond competence
Across Europe, procurement and grant procedures are meant to test technical capacity, financial reliability and value for money—not the inner convictions of those applying. Yet “faith-breaker” declarations (clauses that require a person or company to distance themselves from a religious practice, belief, or community in order to qualify) flip that logic: the gateway condition becomes personal conscience.
That raises immediate Charter concerns, because the EU Charter protects freedom of thought, conscience and religion and prohibits discrimination on grounds including religion or belief.
Why EU auditors would care
EU audit architecture is built around a simple premise: EU money must be spent legally and fairly. If a contract or grant is awarded through a process that violates EU procurement principles or fundamental rights, auditors can treat the resulting expenditure as unsafe.
Two legal hooks matter most:
- Public procurement principles: EU procurement law requires contracting authorities to treat economic operators equally and without discrimination, and to act transparently and proportionately.
- Irregularity doctrine: EU law defines an “irregularity” broadly as any infringement of EU rules—by act or omission—that has or would have the effect of unjustified expenditure from the EU budget.
In practice, that means a discriminatory eligibility condition can taint the whole spending line, even if the project itself looks useful on paper.
The “enabling conditions” safeguard in cohesion funding
For EU shared-management programmes covered by the Common Provisions Regulation (EU) 2021/1060, Member States must meet “enabling conditions” throughout the programming period. Among the horizontal enabling conditions are (1) effective application of the Charter and (2) effective monitoring mechanisms for the public procurement market.
Where an enabling condition is not fulfilled, the Commission can block reimbursement for expenditure linked to the affected objective until compliance is restored and confirmed.
From procurement error to financial correction
Once auditors classify spending as irregular, the consequences can become financial—and fast. The Commission’s procurement-correction guidelines set out flat-rate correction levels (commonly ranging from 5% up to 100%) depending on the seriousness and impact of the breach.
Separately, the CPR also provides tools for financial corrections and payment interruptions where serious weaknesses are found in management and control systems.
Data protection: belief as “special category” data
Faith-breaker declarations can also create a second compliance risk: they may require applicants to reveal information about religious or philosophical belief. Under the GDPR, processing personal data that reveals religious or philosophical beliefs is generally prohibited unless a lawful exception applies and safeguards are met.
For auditors, that matters because unlawful data collection can be part of the same “irregular” chain: a defective procedure, documented through forms and declarations, that leads to EU-funded expenditure.
A national court warning with EU-level implications
In Germany, the Federal Administrative Court ruled in April 2022 that a public “protective declaration” requirement—tied to access to a municipal subsidy—amounted to a targeted interference with constitutionally protected freedom of belief, including the negative freedom not to disclose one’s convictions.
That kind of domestic judgment does not automatically decide EU audit outcomes. But it can strengthen the evidentiary record that a procedure is discriminatory or unlawful—exactly the type of red flag EU auditors look for when assessing legality and regularity.
Could an authority be cut off from future EU funds?
Beyond corrections to a specific project, EU financial rules also include early-detection and exclusion mechanisms that can apply in cases of grave misconduct affecting the EU’s financial interests. These tools are designed mainly for EU-level grants and procurement, but they illustrate the wider policy direction: EU money should not reward unlawful or discriminatory practices.
At the treaty level, the Commission’s duty to implement the EU budget “having regard to the principles of sound financial management” reinforces the idea that fundamental-rights-compliant procurement is not optional—it is part of protecting the EU budget.
What this means in practical terms
If a “faith-breaker” clause appears in a tender or grant procedure connected to EU funding, the risk is not limited to reputational damage or court challenges by excluded applicants. It can trigger a cascade: audit findings, programme-level concern about enabling conditions, financial corrections, delayed reimbursements, and pressure to revise standard documents.
For a wider look at how EU institutions frame freedom of religion or belief as a protected right in the European public sphere, see The European Times’ coverage of the European Parliament’s FoRB intergroup.
