French law on secularity and conspicuous religious symbols in schools

While for most Muslims the concept of hijab is seen as balanced and consistent with ideas of gender equality[citation needed], others see the religious prescription on female covering as chauvinistic, patriarchal, oppressive and an enforcement on women and against their rights.

Most Muslims living in Western societies concede outright that the forcing of women to wear the headscarf is against Islamic precepts and cannot be accepted, but social pressure can in some cases be strong.

French activist and politician Fadela Amara has thus stated: "The veil is the visible symbol of the subjugation of women, and therefore has no place in the mixed, secular spaces of France's public school system.

While there are no accessible official national statistics on the costs of private schools, typical prices per year for low-income families are in the range of a few hundred euros.

In addition, the French government operates a distant learning agency, the CNED, which is another solution for families impacted by the normal rules or schedules of public schools.

Schools funded totally or in part by the national and local governments by law must not force students into religious education; they should remain equally accessible to children of any, or no, faith.

Because of the absence of unambiguous law, action was taken on a case-by-case basis against students wearing ostensible religious garb, with differences of practice between establishments.

In 1989, the Minister of Education requested the legal analysis of the Conseil d'État on the issue of whether or not school administrators could, or should, expel students for wearing religious symbols, within the current framework of applicable regulations, laws, constitutional rights and international conventions.

The general assembly of the Conseil gave a detailed analysis,[8] containing the following opinion: It results from the above that, in teaching establishments, the wearing by students of symbols by which they intend to manifest their religious affiliation is not by itself incompatible with the principle of laïcité, as it constitutes the free exercise of freedom of expression and of manifestation of religious creeds, but that this freedom should not allow students to sport signs of religious affiliation that, due to their nature, or the conditions in which they are worn individually or collectively, or due to their ostentatious and provocative character, would constitute an act of pressure, provocation, proselytism or propaganda, or would harm the dignity or the freedom of the student or other members of the educative community, or would compromise their health or safety, or would perturb the educational activities or the education role of the teaching personnel, or would trouble public order in the establishment or the normal functioning of the public service.On 2 November 1992, the Conseil ruled that a school regulation prohibiting all philosophical or religious signs, including those that were worn, was excessively sweeping and against the principle of laïcité.

It also upheld some stipulations of the school regulations which restricted the wearing of signs of a religious, philosophical or political character, with the same legal analysis as the 1989 one cited above.

The opinion and the decisions of the Conseil, which established some kind of case law, still left a considerable margin of appreciation to school administrators, which led to many tensions and embarrassments.

In July 2003, French President Jacques Chirac set up an investigative committee (commission Stasi) to examine how the principle of laïcité should apply in practice.

The Stasi Commission published its report on 11 December 2003, considering that ostentatious displays of religion violated the secular rules of the French school system.

The report recommended a law against pupils wearing "conspicuous" signs of belonging to a religion, meaning any visible symbol meant to be easily noticed by others.

The Commission's report emphasised that publicly funded schools in France should transmit knowledge, teach students critical awareness, assure autonomy and openness to cultural diversity, and encourage personal development.

Most of the debate has centered on hijab – the Islamic dress code, which may include a headscarf for women, but more generally, on the wearing of religious or political symbols in schools.

However intellectuals such as Xavier Ternisien of Le Monde Diplomatique have maintained that the indubitable rise in religious observance is not linked with Islamic extremism, but with the frustration of children of immigrants no longer accepting to remain invisible as their parents often were.

The representatives of the main religions and leaders of human rights organisations have expressed several objections to a law banning the wearing of religious symbols.

In December 2003, President Jacques Chirac decided to act on the part of the Stasi report which recommended banning conspicuous religious symbols from schools.

This meant that the legislature could adopt the recommendations, according to the emergency procedure, in January or February, ready for application at the start of the next school year in September 2004.

The full or Afghan burka, which covers the entire body except for a slit or grille to see through, occurs more commonly as the dress of an adult woman than that of a schoolgirl.

[10] On 14 February 2004, the Associated Press reported that "Thousands of people, many of them women wearing headscarves, marched in France ... to protest a law banning the Islamic coverings and other religious apparel in public schools."

However, André Victor, member of Workers' Struggle wrote in his article Islamic Hijab and the Subjugation of Women 25 April 2003 Archived 28 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine[13] that "Sarkozy has spoken out against hijab on passport photos, and presumably earned the approval of millions of voters, which was probably the real purpose of this exercise in demagoguery[...] Therefore, this policy leads to increase the weight of the most reactionary religious authorities within the immigrant population."

The French government's promotion of its understanding of the principle of secularism should not result in violations of the internationally recognized individual right to freedom of religion or belief.

Susan Price, an Australian activist, argued that "the wedge-politics of racism has always been used to divide the working class, which in France pulled off spectacular rolling strikes against the government in 2003," adding that "the current attack must also be seen as part of a continuum of racist policies which go back to the mid-1990s and the 'Fortress Europe' policies of the major European capitalist governments" designed "to appeal to the support base of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s right-wing National Front (FN).

In September 2005, the Ministry of Education reported[22] that only 12 students showed up with distinctive religious signs in the first week of classes, compared to 639 in the preceding year.

[29] In April 2015, a 15-year-old schoolgirl in northeastern France was sent home for wearing a plain black maxi skirt, a white shirt, and a pale pink sweater to school, with no head scarf.

[30][29] This incident caused worldwide controversy and infuriated many of the country's Muslims, who saw the school system's punishment of the girl as racially and religiously discriminatory.

In August 2023, French education minister, Gabriel Attal, said that the long, flowing dresses worn by some Muslim women, would be banned as they breached the "principle of secularism", particularly by those pupils "wearing religious attire like abayas and long shirts.”[32] On 4 September, first day of the new academic year, French schools sent 67 Muslim girls to home for refusing to remove their abayas.

[33] On 5 September, a 15-year-old girl living in the French City of Lyon reached school wearing jeans, T-shirt and an open Kimono - a common and popular traditional Japanese garment.