The bans grew increasingly controversial as images circulated online of some Muslim women being ordered to remove body-concealing garments on French Riviera beaches.
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Human rights groups petitioned France’s highest administrative authority, the Council of State, which ruled Friday that banning the burkini violates fundamental rights.
The court said it seriously infringed fundamental freedoms, as it suspended the ban in the Villeneuve-Loubet Cote d’Azur town.
The ban was imposed by the towns across France after a wave of terror attacks have increased religious tensions.
More than two dozen French towns have adopted a similar prohibition-a chain reaction that sprang up in the weeks after a devastating truck rampage in the Riviera resort city of Nice on July 14, Bastille Day, which left 86 dead and hundreds injured.
The court also stated that the burkini ban can not be justified by “proven risks of disruptions to public order nor, moreover, on reasons of hygiene or decency”.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls says burkinis represent the enslavement of women. “Denouncing the burkini is not calling into question individual freedom.It is denouncing deadly, backwards Islamism”.
The issue has filtered into early campaigning for the presidential election in April 2017, making French cultural identity as well as security a hot issue in political debates.
Former French President Nicholas Sarkozy notably called the burkini a “provocation” in a sentiment that was echoed by local officials.
“The council has ruled and has showed that mayors do not have the right to set limits on wearing religious signs in public spaces”, he said, in the absence of a demonstrated threat to public order.
A human rights group, the Human Rights League (LDH), and an anti-Islamophobia association (CCIF), brought the ban in Villeneuve-Loubet to the court’s attention. “Today all the ordinances taken should conform to the decision of the Council of State”. But town hall authorities in Nice said the mayor would continue to fine women wearing burkinis while the mayor of nearby Frejus, David Rachline, said that “the Frejus order is still valid”.
Im relieved with the decision of the highest court, Samia Hathroubi, a French-Tunisian activist from the Foundation of Ethnic Understanding, told Travel + Leisure.
The judges said there was no such risk in the case before the court concerning Villeneuve-Loubet, a resort between Nice and Cannes.
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Hakim, a 42-year-old trader of Algerian origin said that while he welcomed the ruling it did not really reassure him. “It was not like this before, France has changed and it is not easy for us”, he said after Friday prayers at Paris’ main mosque.
