French city challenges state’s burkini rules
The legal row over whether burkinis, or full-body swimsuits, should be allowed in French municipal swimming pools is to go to France's highest administrative court as the city of Grenoble battles the state.
The city, at the foot of the French Alps, has been a centre of a bitter political row since its Green mayor, ric Piolle, who is leading a broad left-wing coalition, proposed loosening rules on swimwear in outdoor municipal pools.
The rules, approved by the city council in May, did not name the burkini, but would allow people to wear any kind of swimwear, including letting men or women cover their body or allowing women to go topless in the same way as men can.
The state took legal action against Grenoble this week. Interior Minister, G rald Darmanin, opposed allowing the burkini to be allowed in municipal pools, calling it an unacceptable provocation and saying it ran against French values of secularism. On Darmanin's instruction, the state governor of Is re region in south-east France asked a local court to intervene in order to suspend the new pool rules from coming into effect on 1 June.
The decision was made by the court in favor of the government and suspended the new rules on Wednesday night, arguing that they seriously violated the principle of neutrality in public service. The case will now go to France's highest administrative court, the Conseil d Etat.
The case is significant because the state challenge was made under Emmanuel Macron's new law to counter Islamist separatism passed by the parliament last year. This law allows the government to challenge decisions that it suspects undermine France's secular traditions intended to separate religion from the state.
The French republic is built on a strict separation of church and state, intended to foster equality for all private beliefs. The state has to be neutral in terms of religion and give everyone the freedom to practise their faith as long as there is no threat to public order.
The mayor of Grenoble argued that wearing burkinis in pools had no correlation with French secularism. State officials in France are not allowed to wear ostentatious religious symbols at work, in order to protect state neutrality, but Piolle said users of public services, such as swimmers, were simply members of the public who were free to dress as they pleased.
The dispute has resulted in a political row before the parliamentary elections next month. It's not the first time that full-body swimwear has caused political controversy before an election season. In the run up to the 2017 presidential election, about 30 French coastal resorts banned the burkini from beaches in the summer of 2016 after an initiative by the rightwing mayor of Cannes.
The anti-burkini decrees were a serious and manifestly illegal attack on fundamental freedoms, including the right to move around in public and the freedom of conscience, according to the Conseil d Etat.
Jordan Bardella, the far-right National Rally Party of Marine Le Pen, said on Thursday that parliament should create a law against burkinis, which he said had no place in France and were a political-religious provocation.