Paris: France’s highest administrative court on Friday suspended a ban on full-body burkini swimsuits that has outraged Muslims and opened divisions within the government.
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But Friday’s ruling was limited in scope, affecting only the ban in the Mediterranean town of Villeneuve-Loubet – an opening salvo in what is likely to be a drawn-out legal and political fight.
Police have fined Muslim women for wearing burkinis on beaches in several towns, including in the popular tourist resorts of Nice and Cannes.
“This is a slap for the prime minister and a kick up the backside for Sarkozy”, said Abdallah Zekri, secretary general of the French Muslim Council, according to Reuters. “They think that in the current context of terror threats, we can abandon the fundamental principles of law as embodied in the Constitution”, he said, warning that such a move would be “a serious mistake”.
Marine Le Pen is predictably all for the ban.
The court deemed the ban an “illegal infringement on basic freedoms such as freedom to come and go, freedom of conscience and personal freedom”.
He told reporters that “rampant Islamisation is progressing in our country” and with the ruling to suspend his town’s ban on burkinis at public beaches “they’ve gained a small additional step”.
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”.
Illustrator Nawak said the ban amounted to “hypocrisy on the beach”.
A Tunisian woman wearing a “burkini”, a full-body swimsuit designed for Muslim women, walks in the water with a child on August 16, 2016 at Ghar El Melh beach near Bizerte, north-east of the capital Tunis.
“Invasive and discriminatory measures such as these restrict women’s choices and are an assault on their freedoms”, Dalhuisen said.
The office of Nice’s mayor denied that the woman had been forced to remove clothing, telling AFP she was showing police the swimsuit she was wearing under her top, over a pair of leggings, when the picture was taken.
But the majority of mayors who imposed the ban have refused to lift it despite the court’s ruling.
“There’s a lot of tension here and I won’t withdraw my decree”, Sisco mayor Ange-Pierre Vivoni told BFM TV, saying that in his Corsica town the ban would be justified on security grounds.
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Aheda Zanetti, the woman who developed the burkini, wrote an op-ed in The Guardian arguing that the burkini ban is fundamentally misguided, as she developed the burkini in the first place as a way to extend freedom to swim and be athletic in public to women who choose to be modest.
