French court declares burkini ban an attack on basic liberties
French ruling welcomed ‘for giving Muslim women back their dignity’ but it also provokes Right-wing backlash with Riviera mayors saying they will defy the judgment
FRANCE’S highest administrative court lifted the burkini ban yesterday, but the emotionally charged political row showed no sign of abating.
The State Council’s decision to “suspend” a prohibition on the full-body swimsuit in a Riviera resort set a legal precedent for dozens of other seaside towns that banned it after the massacre of 86 people in Nice last month.
Asked by human rights groups to deliver a ruling on the ban in Villeneuve- Loubet, the court judged it illegal as it infringed “fundamental liberties”. The ruling provoked Right-wing outrage, with several mayors saying they would ignore it. Two thirds of the public favour banning the burkini, a poll found.
Manuel Valls, the prime minister, said the ruling would not end the debate. “Denouncing the burkini is not jeopardising an individual freedom. There is no freedom that locks up women,” he said.
A CONTROVERSIAL ban on the burkini was overturned by France’s highest administrative court yesterday, prompting a Right-wing backlash as mayors vowed to defy the ruling.
The State Council’s judgment suspended a ban in the Riviera resort of Villeneuve-Loubet and set a legal precedent for about 30 other towns that have also prohibited the full-body swimsuit worn by a minority of Muslim women.
The council ruled that mayors overstepped their powers by introducing the bans this month amid growing anxiety over security after a series of terrorist attacks including the Bastille Day massacre of 86 people in Nice.
“The emotion and the anxieties resulting from the terrorist attacks and especially the one committed in Nice on July 14, are not sufficient to justify legally the prohibition,” the judgment said.
The ban “constituted a serious and manifestly illegal infringement of fundamental liberties”, it said, ruling that mayors “may only restrict freedoms if there are confirmed risks” to public safety, which it said was not the case with the burkini.
Lionnel Luca, the mayor of Villeneuve-Loubet, said: “This decision, far from pacifying, will serve only to heighten tensions which will carry risks of trouble which we wanted to avoid.” He argued that the judgment was inconsistent as another Riviera town, Mandelieu-la-Napoule, introduced an identical ban in 2013 that was never contested.
Mr Luca said he would comply with the ruling, but other local authorities, including the mayor of Sisco, in Corsica, vowed to maintain their bans.
“This judgment does not affect us here because we had a fight over it [the burkini],” said Ange-Pierre Vivoni, referring to a brawl on a beach in Sisco on Aug 13 which preceded the ban.
Mayors who contest the ban will be backed by Nicolas Sarkozy, the former conservative president who introduced France’s ban on the Islamic full-face veil five years ago.
He demanded a nationwide burkini ban this week, placing Islam, immigration and security at the heart of his campaign to win back power from the Socialists in elections next year.
An ally of Mr Sarkozy, Guillaume Larrivé, said: “We support 100 per cent the mayors who introduced bans.” He said parliament could still pass a law banning the burkini, which a poll suggested would be backed by two thirds of French people.
Florian Philippot, deputy leader of the far-Right Front National, accused Mr Sarkozy of “poaching ideas from the FN to dupe our voters into backing him”. Support for the bans is not confined to the Right.
The Socialist prime minister, Manuel Valls, has described the burkini as a “symbol of the enslavement of women” unacceptable under France’s secular constitution.
Mr Valls, who was booed in Nice after the Bastille Day slaughter amid anger that the government had not been tough enough on terrorism, said that the court’s ruling would not “exhaust the debate”. “Denouncing the burkini is not jeopardising an individual freedom. There is no freedom that locks up women! It’s denouncing a deadly, backward Islam,” he wrote on his Facebook page. However, opponents of the bans, who include the Moroccan-born education minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, have argued that they only served to fuel a racist political agenda as the election campaign kicks off.
The court’s decision was welcomed by the French Muslim Council, which described it as a “victory for the law and wisdom … that should make it possible to reduce tension”. Feiza Ben Mohamed of a Muslim group in Villeneuve-Loubet, said it “gives Muslim women back their dignity”.
Asked if it meant burkini-clad women would throng the town’s beach, she laughed and said: “There were hardly any there before the ban so I don’t see why they should turn up there now.”
There was outrage in Britain and around the world after photographs emerged showing armed police apparently compelling a woman on a beach in Nice to remove a long-sleeved top – although she was not in a burkini.
Mayors of the towns that prohibited the Islamic swimsuit justified the bans on the grounds of public order and safety, hygiene or secularism.
Religion and public life are strictly separated in France, which was the first European country to ban the Islamic full-face veil in 2011.
However, few women in France wear the veil or the burkini, and only two towns, Nice and Cannes, have fined women for wearing it.
Amnesty International praised the court’s ruling. “By overturning a discriminatory ban that is fuelled by and is fuelling prejudice and intolerance, today’s decision has drawn an important line in the sand,” said John Dalhuisen, its Europe director.
Critics compared the enforcement of the ban to repression in Saudi Arabia and Iran, where religious police force strict dress codes on women.
Some rights groups have said the new bans amounted to “collective punishment” of Muslims after the terror attacks amid growing friction over immigration.
Terrorism analysts warned that the bans were feeding jihadist propaganda and could help Isil recruit members.
Marine Le Pen, leader of the FN, urged parliament to vote to ban the burkini “in order to protect women, secularism and our way of life”.
‘This decision, far from pacifying, will serve only to heighten tensions which will carry risks of trouble’
Until a few years ago, nobody had heard of a burkini. After this summer, it is unlikely many people will want to hear about the garment ever again. The fact that this item of beach clothing has become such a colossal story is deeply telling of the underlying issues of our time: issues not only to do with the present state of Islam, but also central issues with the current state of the West.
Unknown (and un-invented) though the burkini was until recently, its emergence says much about the global regression of Islam in our day. Throughout Islamic history, injunctions to “modesty” have been agreed upon, but precisely what forms this should take have varied widely.
Nevertheless, from the Middle East outwards there has been a significant regression in recent decades away from all freer forms of female attire. Forty years ago, the burqa was a rare sight in Afghanistan. Today it dominates. In the same way, within the lifetime of most readers the Islamic headscarf was comparatively rare in North Africa. Now it has become commonplace – indeed it is becoming a statement not to wear one. The same regression is happening in Turkey and across Europe. Globally Islam is becoming more puritanical and one of the first signs of this, always, is the suppression of women’s freedom.
Of course to even use the word “freedom” in this context is to tread into a quagmire. With the growth of Muslim populations in the West, “freedom” is thrown back at us. Who are free states to say what freedom is? What about the freedom of people to follow the most un-free Islamic dress codes? Those who make these arguments know that Europeans are nervous about how to respond to such claims.
France has been at the frontline of this debate for two reasons. First, because it has the largest Muslim population per head of population of any western European country. And secondly, because France’s own secular constitution is more clear-cut than any other country, meaning that these contradictions between Islamic demands and the expectations of the republic collide with considerable regularity. The arguments are now practised. But they are also nuanced.
Even the ban on the wearing of the headscarf (and other “conspicuous” religious symbols) in public institutions was only passed a decade ago once French lawmakers realised it was an issue of the freedom of French Muslim women not to wear the headscarf that was at stake and not only the right to wear one.
What were the pressures within the Muslim community for women to cover? How could the state know?
These debates have been rehearsed several times since, not least when the republic banned face-coverings such as the Islamic veil in 2011. Like the burkini ban (which was struck down by a French court yesterday), the “burqa ban” encountered legal challenge. Yet even once it passed it has proved difficult to enforce, with “white knights” repeatedly coming forward to pay the penalties of any women fined for wearing the garment.
Nevertheless, the argument goes, it is a deterrent. On the French Left and Right many people believe that such small but clear markers of the republic’s core principle of laicité are vital and will, over time, encourage France’s Muslims to become like everyone else. They portray the ability of the French state to make such stands as a position of strength. What they are less willing to concede is not only that armed police telling a woman to undress on a beach gives ammunition to the clerics who insist that it is not Islam but the West that forces its “decadent” beliefs on people. But also that – like the Swiss ban on minaret-construction – none of this treats the core of the problem; most likely because it may well be beyond the power of any European state to address.
The most troubling part of that core has already been felt many times this summer. It started on July 14 when a man shouting “Allahu Akbar” ploughed a truck through the packed seafront of Nice, killing 86 people who were there to celebrate Bastille Day. In the days that followed, France and Germany were struck by a succession of Isil-inspired attacks. These included an axe-wielding immigrant on a train in Bavaria, a suicide-bomber outside a music festival in Ansbach and two men who entered a church in Rouen and slit the throat of the priest while he celebrated mass.
Although there has now been a hiatus in these attacks, nobody thinks that they are over. As Isil is pushed into retreat in Iraq and Syria its desire to carry out “spectaculars” in the West will only grow. And besides, Isil is only one manifestation of a global extremism that existed before Isil and will continue after it and has a very large pool of potential recruits among the new populations of Europe. To diminish that pool, European governments should avoid unnecessary policies (such as policing swimwear) that exacerbate unnecessary grievances and focus instead on those necessary policies – slowing Muslim immigration, carrying out proper vetting of those who arrive and expelling anyone who preaches hatred – whether they cause grievances or not.
With this approach currently seen as politically impossible, it is increasingly clear that the governments of Europe are preparing for the worst. In Germany in recent days, the government has been advising citizens to stockpile essentials, including water. A leaked government document also raises the issue of conscription in Germany.
For a country that last year took in perhaps as many as 1.5 million additional Muslims, these are signs of panic. Clearly the Germans are expecting that at some point one of the mass-casualty, possibly chemical or biological attacks that Islamist groups have been trying to carry out for years will be successful. Aside from the fact there is little that the public in Germany, or Britain, could do in such a situation, such warnings are additionally unwise because they do much of the terrorists’ job for them. The German government and Chancellor Merkel, in particular, have a huge problem on their hands.
On the one hand, they cannot admit that their indiscriminate open borders policy – even before 2015 – to have been a mistake. On the other, they rightly fear the public backlash that is already nascent but which would explode should any mass casualty attack occur. And so it is unsurprising that Germany has been having its own burkini debate in recent weeks, with politicians discussing the wisdom of a ban. It is not only the perfect summer story, but also the perfect modern European story. Not one life will be saved by banning the burkini. But the politicians who have presented Europe with this huge societal change now find they have no answers in the face of growing public anger at the circumstances they have brought about.
When a problem has no solutions, the only thing left to do is to change the topic. And so, in the wake of daily attacks, our continent is spending the summer talking beach-wear. Some people may think this is better than nothing. But it isn’t. It is fiddling while Europe boils.