France’s hijab bans in sports ‘discriminatory’: UN experts

‘Muslim women and girls who deterioration the hijab indispensable person adjacent rights to enactment successful taste and sporting life,’ UN experts say.

United Nations rights experts person slammed decisions successful France barring women and girls who deterioration the Muslim headscarf from sports competitions arsenic “discriminatory”, demanding they beryllium reversed.

France invoked its strict rules connected secularism to prohibition its athletes from wearing spiritual symbols, including the hijab, during the Paris 2024 Olympics.

France’s shot and hoops federations person besides opted to exclude players wearing the headscarf from competitions, including astatine the amateur level.

These decisions “are disproportionate and discriminatory, and infringe connected their rights [of French athletes] to freely manifest their identity, their religion oregon content successful backstage and successful public, and to instrumentality portion successful taste life,” said the statement, signed by 8 autarkic UN experts, issued connected Monday.

“Muslim women and girls who deterioration the hijab indispensable person adjacent rights to enactment successful taste and sporting life, and to instrumentality portion successful each aspects of French nine of which they are a part,” they said.

The connection was signed by the UN peculiar rapporteurs connected taste rights, connected number issues, and connected state of religion and belief, and members of the UN moving radical connected favoritism against women and girls.

They are autarkic experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, but who bash not talk connected behalf of the UN.

France’s laws connected secularism are intended to support the authorities neutral successful spiritual matters, portion guaranteeing citizens the close to freely practise their religion.

Among different things, they prohibit pupils and teachers successful schools arsenic good arsenic civilian servants from wearing “ostentatious” spiritual symbols.

But the experts insisted that “the neutrality and secular quality of the authorities are not morganatic grounds for imposing restrictions connected the rights to state of look and state of religion oregon belief.”

“Any limitations of these freedoms indispensable beryllium proportionate, indispensable to scope 1 of the objectives stated successful planetary instrumentality [safety, wellness and nationalist order, the rights and freedoms of others], and justified by facts… and not by presumptions, assumptions oregon prejudices,” they said.

“In a discourse of intolerance and beardown stigmatisation of women and girls who take to deterioration the hijab, France indispensable instrumentality each measures astatine its disposal to support them, to safeguard their rights, and to beforehand equality and communal respect for taste diversity.”

The French contingent astatine the location Olympics successful Paris did not see immoderate hijab-wearing athletes. However, the International Olympic Committee allowed participants to deterioration the hijab successful the athletes’ village.