The mayor of Cannes has banned the wearing of burkinis – full-body swimsuits – on the beaches of the French Riviera resort famous for its annual film festival, officials said on Thursday.
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Muslim group Smile 13, who had booked a public pool to host the event, said they had received several death threats.
In 2011 it became the first country in Europe to ban the full-face Islamic veil, known as the burka, as well as the partial face covering, the niqab.
But a court in Nice rejected the request, saying the move was legal under French law forbidding people from “invoking their religious beliefs to skirt common rules regulating relations between public authorities and private individuals”.
She added that the ban on overtly religious beach outfits didn’t just apply to burkinis.
Women who show up at Cannes’ public beaches wearing a burkini will have to change their attire or leave ― and they could be fined 38 euros ($42), NPR reports.
Luca explained that the ban was put in place “to avoid any disturbance to public order in a region that has been hit by [recent terrorist] attacks”.
“Here in France we have a principal of secularism… but this law only talks about Muslim women”, Ben Mohamed said. Muslim women will still be permitted to wear the veil over their hair.
“This is an abuse of law and we will take it to court”, Hervé Lavisse from the Cannes-Grasse section of the French Human Rights League said.
The city’s mayor imposed the summer ordinance, which bans beach clothes that aren’t “respectful of good morals and secularism”.
France, which has witnessed diverse terrorist attacks in recent months, bans wearing conspicuous religious symbols at schools in accordance with the country’s secular tradition, which separates state from religious institutions.
Sefen Guez Guez, a lawyer for the Collective, has called the rule “illegal, discriminatory and unconstitutional”, according to the BBC.
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And on July 26, a priest was killed in his church in north-western France by two attackers who had proclaimed their allegiance to ISIS. It urged tolerance, noting that Muslims made up about a third of the 85 victims of the July 14 truck attack on the Nice seafront. A statement on its website said the mayor’s logic was “shocking”, and that equating all Muslim symbols to terrorism would create tensions between Catholics and Muslims.
