The mayors of 28 French towns are maintaining burkini bans in defiance of a court ruling, as the issue becomes a key one to the presidential campaign.
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The French court’s ruling only directly affects one French town but sets a precedent that likely means similar bans in other French towns will be struck down if challenged.
The State Council heard arguments from the Human Rights League and an anti-Islamophobia group.
According to officials, such bans are in response to growing terror concerns following a series of terror attacks in France. The swimsuits cover the head, torso and limbs. Police have fined Muslim women for wearing burkinis on beaches in several French towns, including in the popular tourist resorts of Nice and Cannes, sparking controversy in France and overseas.
The Conseil d’Etat suspended a municipal order instituting a burkini ban in Villeneuve-Loubet, a small town on the French Riviera between Nice and Cannes, after an appeal from rights groups.
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy who said he is to run again in the 2017 general elections, on Friday called for a state-wide ban on burkinis.
The debate follows footage released of armed police attempting to force a woman to remove her burkini top on a beach in Nice last week. “The enforcement of these bans leads to abuses and the degrading treatment of Muslim women and girls”.
He said the decision could set a precedent and topple other beach bans that have caused an worldwide furor.
But a number of high-profile politicians in France have supported the decisions of the mayors to ban the burkini after the massacre in Nice on July 14.
The right-wing leader said that lawmakers must vote “as quickly as possible” on an extension of the 2004 law that banned Muslim headscarves and other ostentatious religious symbols in classrooms to include all public spaces.
“These ordinances are not legitimate, they violate freedoms and must be withdrawn”, he said.
The contentious ban prevented women from enjoying the beach, and caused worldwide uproar earlier this week after images surfaced of a woman being forced to undress in public by police officers, or risk getting cited for not wearing an “outfit respecting good morals and secularism”. “There is the principle which is the freedom of religion”. As Cigainero reports, “Valls says France is in a “battle of cultures” and that the burkini represents the enslavement of women”.
A Socialist mayor in northern France and a centrist in the south-east also chose to lift bans at the weekend.
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“Here the tension is very, very, very high and I won’t withdraw it”, Ange-Pierre Vivoni said on BFM-TV.
