A imunidade tributária dos templos como instrumento de proteção da liberdade religiosa : reflexões acerca do seu conteúdo e extensão

Abstract

The purpose of the present work is to investigate the content and the extent of the tax immunity of temples of any cult, once the article 150, VI, “b” of the Federal Constitution, provides no definition of what is to be understood as a temple or what it is meant by a cult, at the same time that its paragraph 4º establishes that the immunity in question includes only the patrimony, the rent and the services related to essential purposes of the mentioned entities. The study begins with the search for the juridical nature of the tax immunity, and after presenting various theories related to the theme, it proposes the following concept: tax immunities are juridical rules exhaustively provided in the Constitution which operate at the level of the own definition of tributary competency, since they delimit it negatively, by establishing situations, persons and goods which are out of reach of taxation, with the purpose of preserving fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitutional itself. Thus, the tax immunities grant to the immune people the subjective public right to demand from the State a duty of abstention, which means that no taxation of any kind may be imposed upon them. Given that such immunity has as its basis the protection of the right to religious freedom, special attention is given to the historical evolution of this right, up to its recognition as a fundamental right. Concerning the interpretation of the tax immunities of the temples, three major concepts are emphasized: temple-thing, temple-activity, temple-entity. The last concept is the one in most accordance with the latest judgments of the Brazilian Supreme Court, according to which the destination of the recourses is what is important, not their sources, meaning that if the destination of the resources apply to the essential purposes of the religious entities they should be immune. This work disagrees with abovementioned interpretation and supports a systematic interpretation of the Constitution which takes into consideration the principle of free competition and the laicism of the Brazilian State as well, in such a way that when a conflict of rights arises, the technique of ponderation must be applied, which consists in conferring weight to the specific situations presented in the concrete case, in order to obtain the solution that will cause less restrictions to the fundamental rights in collision.