The United Nations this week criticised France for refusing to allow women and girls to wear a Muslim headscarf on the sports field. In a report published on Monday, a panel comprised of what the UN called ‘independent experts’ concluded that France’s measures banning women from wearing hijabs in sports were ‘discriminatory’.
The experts said that the measures ‘infringe on individuals’ [French athletes’] rights to express their religion, identity and beliefs, as well as their right to participate in cultural life’. They also said that France’s secularism laws, which were introduced in 1905 to counter the influence of the Catholic church, ‘are not legitimate grounds for imposing restrictions on the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of religion or belief.’
This is not the first time that the UN has targeted France
The panel was mainly composed of international lawyers, some of whom have connections with British or American universities. This is significant. Those not educated in French culture and society have little understanding of French ‘laicite’ (the countries laws protecting secularism) no matter how ‘expert’ they may be in human rights.
This is not the first time that the UN has targeted France. Last year, I wrote a piece for The Spectator asking if the UN ‘wanted to defund the French police’, in response to the UN Human Rights Council’s criticism of the way in which the police and gendarmerie in France had behaved during the recent pension reform protests. Some of these demos were very violent – I know as I was there for The Spectator – and some 2,000 police officers were injured.
The UN’s hostility towards France is a relatively recent phenomenon. In 2004, for example, when France passed a law banning the wearing of religious symbols or garments in school there was no comment from the UN human rights office. This approach changed in the following decade. In August 2016, the UN was critical of France’s decision to ban the burkini, the Islamic swimming costume, from its beaches. The ban had been imposed because the burkini was regarded as not only contrary to France’s secularism laws, but because conversation about it came a fortnight after an Islamist had murdered 86 people by running them down with a truck as they celebrated Bastille Day in Nice.
In 2018, the UN supported the case of two French Muslims who had been convicted in 2012 of wearing the niqab, a veil with an opening for the eyes, which had been proscribed in 2010. ‘The French law disproportionately harmed the petitioners’ right to manifest their religious beliefs,’ said the UN Human Rights Committee, again comprised of independent experts. It demanded that the ban be scrapped, saying that ‘rather than protecting fully veiled women, [it] could have the opposite effect of confining them to their homes, impeding their access to public services and marginalising them’.
As the Franco-Tunisian writer Abdelwahab Meddeb, declared at the start of this century: ‘It’s not up to Europe to adapt to Islam, it’s up to Islam to adapt to Europe, up to Islam to learn to endure criticism.’
If the women felt marginalised, it is because they chose to wear garments that contravene French law. If they dressed conforming to French law, they could leave their house and join the rest of society. This point was subsequently made by the French senate, in response to the UN criticism. The senate passed a resolution in December 2018 by 236 votes to zero that rejected the UN’s position. Describing the wearing of the niqab as a practice which ‘deeply offend[ed]’ France, the resolution stated that its ban had ‘very broad consensus uniting French society’.
As did the decision last year to ban the wearing to school of the full-length Islamic abaya. A poll said the move was supported by 80 per cent of the French public. The UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, wasn’t impressed. ‘In some countries, women and girls are punished for wearing too much clothing. In others, for not wearing enough’, he said in a speech. The architect of the senate resolution in 2018 was Bruno Retailleau, who is now the minister of the interior. He hasn’t responded to the UN’s demand that France drop its ban on the wearing of the hijab on the sports field. He doesn’t really have to.
He made plain his opinion of what the UN has become last November when the organisation invited Iran to chair a human rights meeting in Geneva. ‘If the UN wanted to lose its credibility once and for all,’ he tweeted, ‘it couldn’t do it any other way.’
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