A 15-year-old Muslim girl has been expelled from school in France for wearing a headband and long skirt combination which was considered “too religious”, her teachers confirmed today.
Sirine Ben Yahiaten is now set to launch a criminal complaint for discrimination and harassment following her exclusion from the Prunais college in Villiers-sur-Marne, a Paris suburb.
It comes as President Francois Hollande pledges to reinforce the controversial ban on full-face Islamic veils introduced in 2011.
The Economist examines the contrasting approaches to the hijab and veil in France and the UK.
Prosecutors in Russia’s Siberian region said Wednesday that a local university’s expulsion of a female student for wearing a hijab was unlawful.
Senior regional prosecutor’s aide Yelena Pimonenko told RIA Novosti that it was contrary to the Russian law on education to ban students from wearing items of clothing that reflect their faith. The university’s administration has ten days to appeal the ruling.
BBC News reports on the new assault on the rights of French Muslim women following the recent court ruling that the “Baby Loup” creche discriminated against nursery assistant Fatima Afif when they sacked her for refusing to remove her headscarf.
See also “Hijab ruling exposes Islamophobia in French politics—on right and left”, Socialist Worker, 2 April 2013
Because of her choice to wear a headscarf, Samia Kaddour, a Muslim, has all but abandoned trying to land a government job in France. Soon, some private sector jobs could be off limits, too.
French President Francois Hollande says he wants a new law that could extend restrictions on the wearing of prominent religious symbols in state jobs into the private sector. His new tack comes after a top French court ruled in March that a day care operator that gets some state funding unfairly fired a woman in a headscarf, sparking a political backlash.
French Muslim leaders opened on Friday, March 29, the Bourget’s 30th annual gathering in a climate of anxiety resulting from the recent controversy about hijab ruling.
“There is a real sense of unease among us,” Ahmed Jaballah, the president of the Union of Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF), told Agence France Presse (AFP). “The latest statements on secularism show that there is a drift away,” he added.
Ahmed was referring to the recent controversy which followed a ruling by France’s top court that the dismissal of a Muslim woman from a private nursery school for refusing to remove her hijab amounted to “religious discrimination”.
In an unusual move, French Interior Minister Manuel Valls criticized the ruling against the nursery school as putting “secularism into question”.
The parents of a Muslim student say their daughter was discriminated against when a teacher sent her to the office for wearing traditional Muslim headwear called a hijab, but school officials say the teacher was only following school policy regarding hats and head coverings.
Attia Gray, 15, a sophomore at the Hammond Academy of Science and Technology, said her teacher looked at her hijab on Tuesday and told her she couldn’t wear it. “I said I can’t take it off, it’s for religious purposes. She sent me down to the office.”
A Toronto man is facing charges after a pregnant woman was allegedly assaulted and harassed numerous times in midtown.
It was reported that the suspect was jogging along Yonge Street near Eglinton Avenue West when he veered towards the victim, who was wearing a hijab, struck her and uttered a comment before running off.
On a second occasion the same jogger struck the woman with both hands and continued to run south on Yonge.
Const. Wendy Drummond told the Canadian Press they believe the man may have targetted the woman because of her hijab.
It is alleged that he also criminally harassed her on five other occasions. The incidents occurred between Feb. 25 and Mar. 25.
Shawn Sable, 43, appeared in court on Monday and was charged with two counts of assault and one count of criminal harassment.
Police believe there may be more victims.
Backlash is growing in France against a court ruling in favor of a Muslim employee of a private nursery school who was fired after she refused to take her headscarf off. A new poll has found that four-fifths of people in France would back a proposal to ban Muslim headscarves and other visible signs of religion in private companies.
France’s Interior Minister, who is in charge of religions as well as being the top security official, came out against the ruling last week.
In the poll released Monday, 85 percent of respondents opposed the decision, and more than 80 percent said they back a ban in private workplaces and schools. France already bans headscarves and other “ostentatious” signs of religion in public buildings and has outlawed face-covering veils in all.
Associated Press, 25 March 2013
Update: See also ANSAmed, which reports: “Socialists, intellectuals, politicians and humanitarian NGOs signed an online petition launched by Marianne weekly, calling on the government to enact a new, tougher law in defense of secularism, one that will explain with ‘pedagogy and clarity’ where and when the principle of secularism is to be applied. Prominent signatories include philosophers Elisabeth Badinter, Alain Finkielkraut and Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Socialist Party secretary Harlem Desir, and several former ministers.”
Russian prosecutors said Monday they are looking into the alleged expulsion of a female student from a Siberian university over her hijab.
Last week, a local TV station in the city of Krasnoyarsk reported that an unnamed third-year student from Muslim-populated Dagestan had been expelled from the city’s medical school for wearing a headscarf.