After a month of intense national scandal and heightened global outrage, France’s highest administrative court, the Conseil d’Etat, on Friday overturned the burkini ban in a coastal area of the south of France. “If not legal actions could be taken” against those towns.
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He stuck to his guns Friday evening, saying the State Council’s ruling “does not end the debate which has been opened”.
Paris-Burkini has officially won over its battle against a French ban, which had received its fair share of heated controversy.
Photos and videos of French policemen fining or forcing Muslim women to remove their garments show a frightening development in France..
The administrative court in Nice ruled on Monday that the Villeneuve-Loubet ban was “necessary” to prevent “public disorder” after the Nice attack and the murder of a Catholic priest by two militants in northern France. Religious conservatives, who have been gaining ground, say such bans are enforcing Western-inspired freedoms and styles.
The far-right mayor of Frejus, David Rachline, also insisted his ban was “still valid”, telling AFP there was “no legal procedure” against his ruling.
The ban – setting a 38-euro ($43) fine for Islamic beachwear – followed the death of 86 people in nearby Nice on July 14 when a truck ploughed into a crowd in an attack by the so-called Islamic State.
Human Rights League was among the groups that brought the lawsuit against the town of Villeneuve-Loubet, saying the orders infringe basic freedoms.
It is mostly worn by Muslim women and now has been banned in more than thirty French towns.
Burkini is a swimming suit Muslim women wear which covers most of their bodies.
It took days to untangle the events leading to the violence that many immediately assumed was over a burkini siting.
According to the suspension, Nice’s ban had been lifted which translates into local police forces no longer being able to stop Muslim women from going to the beach or lying on the shore.
The ban “constituted a serious and manifestly illegal infringement of fundamental liberties”, it said, ruling that mayors “may only restrict freedoms if there are confirmed risks” to public safety, which it said was not the case with the burkini.
Other mayors are also looking to defy the high court’s decision.
“The burkini represents the wearer, which could be any woman, not just a Muslim woman, who has a desire for modesty”.
Proponents of the bans say that burkinis violate France’s strict laws on secularism and also pose a security threat.
“It’s a huge victory for human rights, because it reaffirms the rule of law when most politicians are falling in the Islamophobic trap”, he added.
The head of the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, the other group that appealed to the top court, hailed the decision but lamented that the crackdown “will remain engraved in the history of our country”.
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In response, women spoke out to reporters and across Twitter - pointing out that, despite French politicians’ attempt to cloak the ban in feminism as a way of liberating women, it was in truth another way for people to tell women what they were allowed to wear.
