French activists push back on ‘burkini’ ban

A ruling is sought after videos emerge showing women being confronted and fined.

PARIS — French human rights campaigners have asked the country’s highest court to rule on the legality of the so-called burkini ban after a public outcry over police fining Muslim women wearing head scarves.

In one incident, police fined a woman wearing a traditional head scarf knotted at the nape of her neck and a long matching tunic over tight leggings on a beach in Nice. Photographs showed four male officers carrying guns standing over the woman as she stripped off her tunic, though the Nice mayor’s office denied that she had been forced to remove clothing.

Other videos have emerged of women and girls being told to remove head scarves or leave Cote d’Azur beaches.

Several resorts in the French Riviera have banned burkinis and other clothing deemed ostensibly religious, because of increased tension after this summer’s attack in Nice in which an Islamic State sympathizer drove a truck at high speed through crowds celebrating Bastille Day, killing 86.

Officials deem the burkini, which covers the body and head, to be a challenge to French values of secularism and gender equality and a threat to public safety after complaints and outbreaks of violence. On the French Mediterranean island of Corsica last weekend, about 200 police officers broke up brawling locals who had apparently turned on a family that included two women wearing what some believed was religion-mandated clothing.

Opponents of the ban say it is discriminatory and will only ramp up tension by suggesting all those wearing Islamic dress have terrorism links.

Feiza Ben Mohamed, spokeswoman and secretary general of the Southern Federation of Muslims, posted a video online showing four young girls — one wearing a head scarf, another a T-shirt and shorts — being cautioned by police.

After a series of videos emerged on social media of women being fined for wearing not just the burkini but dress considered incompatible with France’s secular principles, the Council of State, the nation’s highest administrative body, is expected to rule on the burkini question Thursday after the French Human Rights League said the ban was illegal and an attack on basic freedoms.

In another incident, a woman who gave her name only as Siam contacted the news media to say she had been fined and ordered off a beach in Cannes because she was wearing a hijab.

The 34-year-old mother of two said she was warned that she was not dressed “correctly and with respect to standards of secularism,” according to the citation she showed Agence FrancePresse.

After she refused to pay the $12.37 fine, she said, officers asked her to leave.

“I was sitting there on the beach with my family,” she said. “I was wearing a classic head scarf, a flowered hijab .... I wasn’t there to be provocative and I had no intention of swimming.

“I was totally shocked. I heard things nobody has ever said to my face before like ‘Go home’ and ‘Madam, the law is the law. We’ve had enough of these things,’ or ‘Here we’re Catholics.’ ”

A witness to the Aug. 16 incident in Cannes, Mathilde Cusin, a journalist with France24, confirmed the woman’s version of events.

“They were telling her to leave or take off her scarf. It was so quite violent,” Cusin told Agence France-Presse that day. “During all this, her daughter was crying.”

On Monday, a Nice tribunal ruled that the burkini ban in Villeneuve-Loubet was “necessary, appropriate and proportionate” to prevent public disorder. It said the beach wear was “liable to offend the religious convictions or nonconvictions of other beach users.”

On Wednesday, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve had an emergency meeting with Anouar Kbibech, president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith.

“In the very serious and critical situation France finds itself following the tragic attacks that have profoundly hit the country, we call for wisdom and responsibility for everyone,” Kbibech said afterward. “Today we need more than ever to show calm and tolerance.”

Cazeneuve told journalists that the clothing bans “must not lead to stigmatization or division.”

According to French Riviera police, 16 women have been given verbal warnings for wearing inappropriate clothing in Nice and six in Cannes.