France’s highest administrative court has suspended the ban on women wearing burkini swimsuits that had been in force in the southern seaside town of Villeneuve Loubet.
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The legal challenge focused on the ban in the town of Villeneuve-Loubet on the French Riviera, but the Council’s ruling will be binding for all the 30 or so towns that have banned the burkini. It prohibited the beach access to “any person that does not have a dress, respectful of morality and the principle of secularism, and respect the rules of hygiene and safety adapted swimming maritime public domain”.
“By overturning a discriminatory ban that is fuelled by and is fuelling prejudice and intolerance, today’s decision has drawn an important line in the sand”, Amnesty’s Europe director John Dalhuisen said.
Hundreds of supporters waving French flags chanted his name and applauded as Mr. Sarkozy, who led France from 2007-2012 before losing an election to Socialist Francois Hollande, promised to protect the French people.
But when pictures emerged of French police apparently ordering a woman to remove part of her clothing on a beach in Nice on Wednesday, it divided opinion around the globe.
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.
The burkini bans have triggered a fierce debate about the French state’s strict secularism policy. “The judges of the State Council thus suspend this ban”, the court wrote in its decision Friday.
Reuters adds that former French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Thursday that if elected president, he would institute a nationwide ban on the burkini.
Several mayors, however, have articulated their defiance to the court order to the French news agency Agence France Presse, and said that they will continue to enforce the ban, including in the towns of Nice and Frejus.
Mr Spinosi represents the Human Rights League (LDH) which, along with the anti-Islamophobia association (CCIF), took Villeneuve-Loubet to the highest court in the land.
The issue has created a rift in government.
Vallaud-Belkacem, who is of Moroccan origin, took issue with the wording of the ban in Nice which linked the measure to last month’s militant truck attack in the resort that killed 86 people.
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Human rights activists argue that burkini bans are illegal, and that pushes to outlaw the garment are Islamophobic. Religion and public life are strictly separated in France, which was the first European country to ban the Islamic full-face veil in 2011.
