Top French court rules against burkini bans

FRANCE | PARIS — France’s top administrative court on Friday overturned a ban on burkinis in a Mediterranean beach resort, effectively meaning that towns can no longer issue bans on the swimsuits that have divided the country and brought world attention to its fraught relationship with Muslims.

The ruling by the Council of State specifically concerns a ban on the Muslim garment in the Riviera town of Villeneuve-Loubet, but the binding decision is expected to impact all the 30 or so French resort municipalities that have issued similar decrees.

The bans grew increasingly controversial as images circulated online of some Muslim women being ordered to remove body-concealing garments on French Riviera beaches.

Lawyers for a human rights group and a Muslim collective challenged the legality of the ban to the top court, saying the orders infringe on basic freedoms and that mayors have overstepped their powers by telling women what to wear on beaches.

Despite the court victory, the debate was unlikely to go away. Prime Minister Manual Valls, who supported the bans, called the debate “fundamental” for secular France, where religious displays are unwelcome in the public space.

Valls wrote on his Facebook page that denouncing the burkini “in no way puts into question individual freedom” and is really about denouncing “fatal, retrograde Islamism.” The burkini, he wrote, “is the affirmation of political Islam in the public space.”

Mayors had cited multiple reasons for the bans, including security after a string of Islamic extremist attacks, risk to public order, and France’s strict rules on secularism in public life.

The Council of State ruled that, “The emotion and concerns arising from the terrorist attacks, notably the one perpetrated in Nice on July 14, cannot suffice to justify in law the contested prohibition measure.”