Yahoo – AFP,
13 March 2015
Berlin (AFP) - Germany's top court said Friday that Muslim teachers can wear the Islamic headscarf in class as long as it doesn't disrupt school activities, in a ruling likely to revive emotional debate.
Berlin (AFP) - Germany's top court said Friday that Muslim teachers can wear the Islamic headscarf in class as long as it doesn't disrupt school activities, in a ruling likely to revive emotional debate.
The
Constitutional Court said Muslim teachers in state schools could no longer face
a blanket ban on the headscarf, effectively revising its 2003 decision that
left the door open to it being barred.
Judges at
the Karlsruhe-based court in southwest Germany said a ban could only be
justified if the wearing of the Islamic headscarf led to a "sufficiently
concrete danger" of disruption in the school, or of "state
neutrality".
The ruling
is likely to relaunch a longstanding debate in a country with around four
million Muslims amid recent divisive protests against the supposed
"Islamisation" of Europe.
Since 2003
several of Germany's 16 regional states, which are responsible for education,
have banned teachers wearing the Muslim headscarf following the top court's
initial ruling.
The
Constitutional Court had said it was up to each state to write its own laws on
the issue.
But in
their decision published Friday following a complaint by two Muslim women, the
judges ruled that an outright ban fell foul of the basic right to religious
freedom in Germany.
The judges
also said that Christian values and traditions should not be given preference,
as is the case in Germany's most populous state of North Rhine-Westphalia
(NRW).
The two
plaintiffs, a teacher and a school social worker, from western NRW state had
lodged the complaint against the ban.
Nurhan
Soykan, general secretary of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany,
welcomed the ruling, saying that even if it did not amount to a "general
permit" for the headscarf, it sent a "positive message".
Germany saw
weekly protests begin late last year by the populist PEGIDA movement, Patriotic
Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident, but the marches in the
eastern city of Dresden have waned recently.
The
country, home to the biggest Turkish community outside of Turkey, has heatedly
debated the headscarf issue since neighbouring France passed a law in 2004
banning the wearing of headscarves or any other "conspicuous" religious
symbols in state schools.
No comments:
Post a Comment