A court in Bastia on the northern tip of Corsica ruled on Tuesday that a burkini ban, suspended last month by France’s highest administrative court, should be upheld.
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The bans grew increasingly controversial as images circulated online of some Muslim women being ordered to remove body-concealing garments on French Riviera beaches.
More than 100 police officers had to intervene to break up the fight.
The burkini was initially outlawed in a dozen or so southeastern French towns since it “manifests adherence to a religion at a time when France and places of worship are the target of terrorist attacks”.
Nice, Cannes and several other towns on France’s Mediterranean coast have lifted bans following the Council of State’s ruling.
The court in the town of Bastia on Tuesday ruled in favor of the mayor of Sisco, a city on the island, who had decided not to suspend the burkini ban – as ordered by the French Supreme Court for Administrative Justice – and referred the matter to the Bastia court to gain legal approval. Radical and sectarian Islam and its fanatics, he said, “are looking for ways today to destabilize the French republic with the aim of vanquishing the societal model we inhabit today”.
Sisco’s mayor said the ruling was “a relief for me and local people”, adding that he brought in the ban because he “risked having deaths on my hands”.
“French Muslim women would be justified to request asylum in the United States. given how many persecutions we are subjected to”, another women said. Valls, bafflingly, claimed that the quotes had all been collected at an event called a “decolonial summer camp”, an event held in France in late August for religious and ethnic minorities to discuss discrimination and tactics to counter it.
France’s top administrative court had only last month overturned a ban on burkinis. “Millions of citizens of the Muslim faith or culture respect their duties perfectly and fully enjoy their duties”.
According to local prosecutor Eric Bouillard, the two men who stopped the women “thought it wasn’t right that their children weren’t allowed to wear emblems of their religion at school and yet these women could enter with their veils”. In the piece, French Muslim women described being persecuted, mistreated, and discriminated against due to their religious beliefs. Witnesses said hatchets and harpoons were used.
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Ending a long and conspicuous silence on the burkini ban in France, the president of the umbrella group of French Jews appeared to support the ban, saying he favored limiting “political-religious” symbols.
