And a second southern French town, Villeneuve-Loubet, announced a similar ban this week.
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Under the so-called 2011 “burqa-ban” in France, women are barred form wearing full face veils in public but they are not banned from wearing burqinis, which normally cover the whole body, but the face. The organizers, the Smile 13 group, which describes itself on Facebook as a sports and social event group for women and children, said they had received death threats, with one person even claiming that they had received bullets in the mail.
The League of Human Rights said in a statement that it would challenge the “burkini” ban in court.
France has been the target of several terror attacks in the past few years; a truck attack in Nice in July was the most recent incident.
Swimwear “manifesting religious affiliation in an ostentatious way, while France and its religious sites are now the target of terrorist attacks, could create risks of trouble to public order”, added Lisnard, who has called the burkini “the uniform of extremist Islamism”.
In a move that will shock many as the Mayor of Cannes, on the south coast of France, has made a decision to ban “burkinis”. Cannes municipal authorities later commented that the ban was only against “ostentatious clothing” that could be linked to an allegiance with terrorist organizations.
“They are like uniforms”, said David Lisnard, Cannes’ Mayor. In 2010, the French parliament passed a law banning burqas and forbidding people from concealing their faces in public.
The mayor of the French Riviera resort of Cannes has banned women from wearing burkinis on the beach.
The mayor of Cannes, famous for its annual film festival, said he had signed off on the burkini ban out of “respect for good customs and secularism”, a founding principle of the French republic. The CCIF’s next move will be to appeal the decision to France’s highest court.
It comes almost a month after a terror attack in nearby Nice, where a man drove a heavy truck through a Bastille Day crowd on the city’s main beach promenade, killing 84.
And earlier this week, a water park in the city of Marseille canceled a burkini-only event scheduled for September after complaints, according to the BBC.
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French officials have defended the laws, which are meant to “preserve secular values and protect women from religious oppression”.
