Swedish Muslim wins bias lawsuit in labor court

STOCKHOLM — A Muslim woman in Sweden who said she was discriminated against in a job interview for refusing to shake hands on religious grounds has been awarded financial compensation by a labor court.

The woman, Farah Alhajeh, 24, was interviewing for a job as an interpreter at Semantix, a language services company, in the city of Uppsala, north of Stockholm, in May 2016, when the person conducting the interview offered to introduce her to a male boss. Alhajeh said she placed her hand on her heart as a greeting, smiled, and explained that she avoided physical contact because she was Muslim.

She was shown to the elevator.

“It was like a punch in the face,” Alhajeh, who was born in Sweden, said by telephone from her home in Uppsala on Thursday, a day after the ruling. “It was the first time someone reacted, and it was a really harsh reaction.”

A Swedish labor court agreed, ruling Wednesday that the company had discriminated against Alhajeh and ordering it to pay about $4,350 in compensation.

The case, brought by Sweden’s equality ombudsman, raised numerous thorny issues in a country already wrestling with questions of immigration and integration. Among them: whether a female Muslim employee could refuse to shake hands as a greeting in the workplace, said Martin Mork, who leads litigation at the ombudsman’s office.

Alhajeh, the labor court said in a statement, “adheres to an interpretation of Islam that prohibits handshaking with the opposite sex unless it is a close member of the family.” The court concluded that “the woman’s refusal to shake hands with people of the opposite sex is a religious manifestation that is protected under Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights.”

But the company with which Alhajeh had interviewed argued that its staff members were required to treat men and women equally, and that it could not allow a staff member to refuse handshakes based on gender.