UK Edition
French mayors who banned burkini to defy court ruling against them
Mayors of 28 French towns are maintaining burkini bans in defiance of a court ruling, heralding a series of bitter legal battles as the controversy becomes a key issue in the presidential campaign.
The judgement on Friday by the State Council, France’s highest administrative court, that it is illegal to prohibit the full-body swimsuit applies specifically to one resort, Villeneuve-Loubet.
Its conservative mayor said he would comply with the decision, which set a legal precedent for the other 30 seaside towns that banned the burkini.
Bans were also lifted during the weekend by a Socialist mayor in northern France and a centrist in the south-east.
Most of the other 28 mayors who are insisting on keeping the bans belong to the centre-Right Republicans or the far-Right Front National.
All but one of the bans were imposed by mayoral decrees after the Bastille Day massacre of 86 people in Nice last month as fears of Islamist terrorism gripped the nation, although 30 of the dead were Muslim.
After the court ruling, the mayors of several Riviera resorts urged municipal police to redouble their efforts to keep beaches free from burkinis, worn by a tiny minority of Muslim women in France.
In Nice, video footage showed police in a motorboat ordering a woman who was wearing a headscarf, a long top and leggings to leave a beach on Saturday. She explained that she had not gone into the water, but then gathered up her things and walked away with her daughter and husband, who had been swimming.
In another incident in Nice, two women wearing sunhats and hijabs covering their hair and necks were also ordered off a beach.
Gil Bernardi, the centre-Right mayor of another Mediterranean resort, Le Lavandou, said: “There are no burkinis on the beach (here) and we are making sure it stays that way. The beach is a place to relax, not a space for ideological or religious confrontation.”
Mr Bernardi said the burkini was an affront to France’s secular constitution which enforces the separation of religion and state, as well as being “unhygienic”.
But human rights groups said they are preparing to sue towns whose mayors insist on keeping the bans.
“All of these municipal orders will be contested in court if they are maintained,” said Patrice Spinosi, a lawyer for the Human Rights League which successfully challenged the Villeneuve-Loubet ban.
“The League has already made plans to demand the lifting of these different orders which do not respect basic freedoms.” Mayors defying the ruling are backed by the former conservative president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the Socialist prime minister, Manuel Valls, who has repeatedly condemned the burkini as a symbol of repression.
The burkini has divided both the Right and the Left with eight months to go before the presidential election, in which the Front National is expected to make strong gains,
Mr Sarkozy has called for a national ban, but his rival to become the centre-Right presidential candidate, Alain Juppé, said he prefers “dialogue” with the Muslim community.
Mr Valls wants a national political debate on the bans, which he backs — as do two-thirds of the French, according to a recent poll — but most of his Socialist colleagues welcomed the State Council’s ruling.