Harun Nasrullah
A Muslim primary school teacher has lost her bid to overturn a law banning the wearing of religious clothing by public servants in Berlin.
The Berlin Labour court judge ruled last month that the city-state’s neutrality law for teachers, police and court officials was constitutional. Zeynep Cetin of the Network Against Discrimination and Islamophobia, argued that the ruling was like a ban on the teacher involved.
Germany’s 16 states have differing laws on headscarves in schools.
In 2015 Germany’s constitutional court overturned a blanket ban on teachers wearing them, since the Federal ruling, each state has devised its own rules for Muslim teachers.
The Federal Court cited religious freedom, even though civil servants across Germany are barred from wearing the niqab. The full face-veil is not allowed on a national level but the hijab is.
The teacher in Berlin worked at the primary school for just one day before being assigned to a secondary school.
This is not the first time the issue of the hijab has made headlines in Germany. Police were recently called when a head teacher at a primary school in the state of Hesse wrote to parents telling them that wearing the hijab was not allowed in the classroom.
In Bremen, in the north-west, teachers are allowed to wear headscarves, while in North Rhine-Westphalia the issue is decided on a case-by-case basis. The western state is proposing a ban on girls under 14 wearing headscarves in schools.
AlsahdiqJuly 13, 2018
Will the Berlin court also ban Nuns from wearing their hijab?