Woman to fight France over swimwear fine,
Police carrying pepper spray ordered Muslim mother on Riviera to remove covering
A Muslim mother from France says she’s going to challenge a fine for wearing a burkini on the Riviera. The woman — who gave her name only as “Siam” — was ordered to remove her covering by French police officers carrying pepper spray and batons on August 16 in Nice.
The fine was for 11 euros, which is about $16.
Also Wednesday, images circulated of at least four police officers standing around a woman just metres from the town’s Promenade des Anglais, the scene of last month’s Bastille Day truck attack that killed 86 people. More than a dozen French communities along the Riviera have banned the burkini, which is much like a wetsuit but with a head covering.
Last week, Nice became the latest French resort city to ban the burkini.
In Siam’s case, she was sitting on the beach in a flower-patterned veil, tunic and leggings.
Enforcement of burkini rules have triggered a fierce debate about the beachwear.
Even French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has weighed in, calling the burkini a symbol of women’s enslavement.
“It is the expression of a political project, a counter-society, based notably on the enslavement of women,” Valls said.
The French newspaper Le Figaro reports that the 34-year-old mother was fined for not wearing “a respectful dress code of morality and secularism.”
She was described as a former airhostess from Toulouse whose family members have been French citizens for at least three generations.
“I was sitting on the beach with my family,” she told the French news agency AFP. “I was wearing a traditional scarf, a flower hijab.”
“I was not there to make provocation,” she said. “I did not intend to swim,” Siam said.
When asked why she was dressed “inappropriately,” Siam replied: “I didn’t know exactly what was going on, I hadn’t really followed the controversy.”
Witness Mathilde Cusin reportedly said: “I saw three police officers watching the beach. One of them had his finger on the trigger of his tear gas device, no doubt containing pepper.”
“The sad thing is that people were screaming (to the mother) ‘go home!,’ ” Cusin said.
Some bystanders applauded the police as her daughter cried, Cusin said.
The ban on the Islamic burkini swimsuit by several French towns will go to court on Thursday. The Human Rights League (LDH) is appealing a decision by a lower court in the Riviera city of Nice, which upheld a ban on the outfit by the town of Villeneuve-Loubet.
The Nice tribunal ruled on Monday that the ban in the nearby community of Villeneuve-Loubet was “necessary, appropriate and proportionate” to prevent public disorder after a succession of jihadists attacks in France, including the one in Nice on July 14.
The burkini was “liable to offend the religious convictions or (religious) non-convictions of other users of the beach,” and “be felt as a defiance or a provocation exacerbating tensions felt by” the community, it added. With files from AFP, Le Figaro