Paris: A court ruling this week is set to increase the pressure on French Muslims, potentially at the expense of the country's fraught race relations, experts fear.
Frenchwomen who wear headscarves out of faith could see their freedom to do so curtailed after a Paris appeals court's decision to uphold a nursery's right to dismiss a worker who insisted on wearing a hijab at work, according to a report in AFP.
At the heart of the case was the question of whether France's strict ban on any overt religious symbols being displayed in state schools and other public institutions could be applied to what was a privately run nursery.
A lower court had said no in March but, after an outcry across the political spectrum, that ruling was overturned on Wednesday. Although further legal wrangling is likely before the issue is definitively settled, the notion that private employers can tell employees how to dress on the basis of a principle of religious neutrality has been established for the time being.
"A line has been breached," said Franck Fregosi of the national research center (CNRS). "Until now, the idea of religious neutrality was exclusively an issue for the public sector.
"The problem is that a number of recent developments, including this one, are perceived as being directed exclusively at Muslims, even if the current government actually targets Islam less (than its predecessor)", he added.
Among those recent developments was the issuing in September of a "Charter for Secularity in School," designed to promote better understanding of the principle of the separation of church and state.
Dalil Boubakeur, the chairman of the French Muslim Council, said at the time that 90 percent of the estimated five million Muslims in France would see the charter as targeting them.
Similar concerns have been raised over a debate in some universities about whether Muslim women students should be allowed to wear headscarves to lectures and by a proposal for women who do child-minding at home to be questioned on their religious neutrality.
Not a month seems to go by without some new legal case in which the core issue is how to balance religious freedom with secularism.
Earlier this year a girl was excluded from her school after a headband and long skirt were deemed to constitute overtly religious garb. The exclusion was overturned on appeal and her parents are now suing the school for racial discrimination.
Last year, a local council was forced to rescind a decision to sack four holiday camp workers on the grounds that, by not eating in daylight during Ramadan, they endangered the children in their care.
This week has seen a debate flare over a ruling by an administrative tribunal in Grenoble that a local prison should be providing halal food for Muslim prisoners.
According to Jean Bauberot, who lectures in religion and secularity, the ruling in the nursery case this week has established a dangerous legal precedent.
"In the name of secularism we have abandoned the rule of law and the reality is that this secularism serves to disguise some far less honorable things," Bauberot said.
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