The European Commission and Court of Human Rights have both been called upon to consider the scope of Article 9. Unfortunately, the resulting jurisprudence is not entirely satisfactory. There are a number of possible reasons for this, but two factors have been particularly important. The first is that there were no early cases in which the Court set out guiding principles. Compared to other articles of the Convention, the Court has had few opportunities to consider Article 9 and the most important of these, the Kokkinakis case, was only decided in 1993. Moreover, that decision was soon followed by the Otto-Preminger-Institut case which explored the degree to which the sensibilities of religious believers could justify restrictions upon the scope of the freedom of expression under Article 10(2). The tension between these cases, and between the Court and Commission, is currently being tested in the Wingrove, Ahmet and Manoussakis cases.

The second general factor is that many of the applications considered by the Commission in its early years fell into a number of distinct categories, such as cases concerning conscientious objectors or prisoners' rights. Although the principles established within these groups of cases had a certain internal consistency, there were some contradictions between the categories. This encouraged subsequent cases to be considered within whichever category seemed most appropriate, rather than in the light of Article 9 as a whole. In consequence, not only have all the various elements of Article 9 not been thoroughly analysed, but where such analysis has been attempted it has been overly influenced by the background provided by the general category into which the case has fallen.