France’s State Council has suspended the ‘burkini ban’ imposed in Villeneuve-Loubet, a coastal town in the south of France.
The French Human Rights League (LDH) and an anti-Islamophobia group, the CCIF, first challenged Villeneuve-Loubet’s ‘burkini ban’ at the Administrative Tribunal in Nice, as a test case. When the local tribunal upheld the ban, the groups appealed to France’s highest administrative court, which today found that the ban “seriously and clearly illegally breached fundamental freedoms”, including freedom of belief.
The ruling will affect the decision to impose the ban on over 20 other coastal towns, mostly along the French Riviera. The court will make a final decision on the legality of the bans later.
However, it is being reported that the mayor of Corsica has already vowed to keep the ban in place.
Earlier Jean-Pierre Dubois, president of the LDH, who challenged the bans, said they were “absurd”.
In an interview for World at One on BBC Radio 4 yesterday, he said: “If you read the decision of the local administrative judge [in Nice], you find this incredible sentence that says that ‘wearing a burkini is to be on the same side as terrorist people.’ If somebody can really think that, without being drunk, let’s quit any kind of reasonable dialogue in a democracy.”
Mr Dubois told BBC presenter Edward Stourton that the ban was motivated by political rather than security concerns. “It was not at all the answer to any kind of trouble about public order. These measures created troubles, because now you have some conflicts on the beaches that you didn’t have before. There is no problem of security, no problem of public order, it’s just discrimination, and a political manoevre in the context of the next presidential election.”
Nicolas Sarkozy has said he will impose a nationwide ban on burkinis if he is re-elected president in 2017.
On the same programme, Rudy Salles, the deputy mayor of Nice, defended the ban, saying that wearing the ‘burkini’ (akin to a wetsuit covering the head but not the face) was a “provocation”.
When Mr Stourton asked why it was provocative “to dress modestly on a beach”, Mr Salles replied: “We had a terror attack, a terrible terror attack on the beach one month ago. You can imagine the feeling of the people [in the face of] the claim of the extremists, of Salafists... 95, 96 per cent of the women who are Muslim want to be like other women of France. They want to be integrated, they want to work, they want to live like the women of this country.”
However, Mr Salles also said that the ban, which in Nice forbids any beachwear that “overtly manifests adherence to a religion”, would forbid Catholic nuns from appearing on the beach in their habits. “[It’s] the same,” he said. “The nuns are going on the beach with bathing suits!”
The State Council is yet to make a final decision on the legality of the bans.
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