Companies can ban headscarves at workplace: European Court of Justice – Free PDF Download

EU to ban headscarves at work

• the European Union’s highest court reaffirmed that companies in Europe can forbid women from wearing headscarves to work — a ruling that led to widespread condemnation from human rights activists and Muslim nations for appeasing Islamophobia.

• The Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling was not limited to headscarves alone. It applies to all visible symbols of religious and political belief. The court said the bloc’s 27 member states will have to justify whether there is a “genuine need” on the part of the employer to ban these religious markers.

• The European Court of Justice formally just the Court of Justice, is the supreme court of the European Union in matters of European Union law.
• As a part of the Court of Justice of the European Union, it is tasked with interpreting EU law and ensuring its equal application across all EU member states

• The ruling was based on separate cases brought to the court by two German Muslim women who were suspended from their jobs for wearing hijabs. Both women — one of whom worked at a childcare centre in Hamburg, while the other was a cashier at a pharmacy — were not wearing headscarves when they started working for their respective employers. They adopted hijabs after coming back from parental leave.
• According to court documents, both women were told that donning the headscarf was not permitted.
• The childcare centre employee was suspended twice after she refused to take off her headscarf, while the pharmacy worker was transferred to a less visible post, where she did not have to interact with customers as much.

• The court said company policies barring workers from wearing “visible form of expression of political, philosophical or religious beliefs in the workplace” did not qualify as direct discrimination as long as the same rules applied to religious symbols and garb across faiths.
• The headscarf has been at the centre of controversy and debate in Europe for years. In fact, the ECJ’s latest ruling is based on a similar decision it made in 2017.
• Then, the EU court had said that companies may ban staff from wearing any visible religious symbols, including headscarves, under specific conditions. At the time, too, the ruling sparked a huge outcry among activists and the Muslim world.
• Over the years, across Europe, many courts have been able to impose restrictions on donning religious symbols or garb in the workplace as well as public spaces such as parks.
• France, for instance, prohibited the wearing of hijabs in state schools in 2004.
• French senate’s controversial ‘anti-separatism’ bill sparked widespread protests, with critics denouncing it for singling out the Muslim community. As part of its proposed initiatives to help promote secularism, the senate seeks to impose a ban on girls under 18 wearing the hijab in public.
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the wearing of full-face veils should be prohibited “wherever it is legally possible”.
• Bans on religious clothing and symbols for teachers and other civil servants in Germany led some Muslim women to give up teaching careers. A ban on face coverings in France, upheld by the European Court of Human Rights, led to fines for nearly 600 Muslim women in less than three years and France’s 2004 law banning the wearing of headscarves in schools kept some Muslim girls from finishing school.
• For any women forced to wear a headscarf or veil, such prohibitions do not address root causes of oppression but risk in practice further curtailing their engagement with society, increasing their isolation. Rather than helping dismantle patriarchal norms that underpin control of women’s bodies and behavior, such prohibitions can feed them.
• Muslim women shouldn’t have to choose between their faith and their jobs.

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