At a pre-hearing review in March 2009, employment judge David Sneath granted Nicholson permission to make his claim for unfair dismissal under the UK's Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations which came into force in 2003.
The shift from collectivisation to a market economy, Mr Sneath argues, was in many ways a far more wrenching change, one that undermined or destroyed institutions that had long sustained nomadic pastoralism, particularly ones that spread risk and reaped economies of scale.