Court of the European Union: Hijab ban in the workplace is free

According to the report of Fars International News Agency, the European Court of Justice, as the highest authority for dealing with issues related to the laws of the European Union, ruled that the members of this union can prohibit employees from wearing clothes that reflect religious beliefs.

The ruling by the European Court of Justice comes after a Belgian woman claimed her employer violated her religious freedoms by telling her she could not wear the hijab at work.

The issue of wearing the hijab at work is one of the issues that have always caused disagreements among European countries in the past years.

In 2021, this court ruled that women should refrain from wearing the hijab if they are in jobs that require interaction with the public, and if they do not follow this principle, they can be fired from the workplace.

The most recent legal challenge in this area is related to a Muslim employee of the municipality of the East region in the city of “Anne”, Belgium, who was told that he cannot wear a headscarf at work.

This woman, who heads an office at her workplace and her duties do not include interacting with people, complained about her workplace.

This municipal department changed its employment conditions after that and announced that employees are required to observe complete neutrality, and observing this principle means that openly wearing anything that It is not allowed for any employee to indicate one’s ideological or religious affiliations.

The “labor court” in the city of “Liège” said that it is not sure whether the principle of neutrality established by this municipality is an example of discrimination and a violation of EU laws or not.

The European Court of Justice responded by saying that officials in EU member states have the right to determine the level of neutrality at their own discretion.

In this ruling, it is stated that if another department decides not to prohibit the wearing of obvious signs of religious, political or philosophical beliefs, it still has not violated the law.

France is among the EU member states that have strict rules on wearing religious symbols in schools and government buildings. Paris believes that wearing these symbols violates secular laws in the country.

Since 2004, the French government has banned the wearing of the Islamic hijab in public schools. Muslims make up 10 percent of France’s population of 67 million, but Paris has argued that Islamic headscarves indicate a person’s religious affiliation and violate laws on secularism in education.

While some French government officials have admitted that dozens of Muslim students have not paid attention to the law banning Islamic clothing.

While the number of Muslims in many European countries has been increasing, Islamophobia has also intensified in these countries in recent years.

Islamophobia has been created as a result of numerous developments in the level of historical relations between the Islamic world and the West on the one hand and in the level of contemporary developments in Islamic societies and Western countries on the other hand. . This term appeared in the early 20th century, but in practice, it existed before that.

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