Top French court overturns burkini bans

PARIS – After a month of intense national scandal and heightened international outrage, France's highest administrative court, the Conseil d'Etat, overturned on Friday the so-called "burkini bans" imposed by 26 of the country's coastal towns and cities.

Imposed in the name of secularism, perhaps France's most sacred ideal, the bans had prohibited Muslim women from wearing the "burkini"-a full-body bathing suit designed to respect traditional codes of modesty-on the beach.

[7 facts about France's burkini controversy]

Some of the burkini's critics had attempted to cast this particular Australian-born garment as yet another burqa, the full-face veil that, in 2010, France became the first European country to ban outright. This followed an earlier 2004 law that prohibited religious wear such as headscarves in public schools.

The argument behind both was — and remains — that Muslim modesty somehow impedes the rights of women in the historic French Republic of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

This is why, for instance, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls expressed his opposition to the bathing suit in nothing less than the language of human rights: the burkini, he said, was a means of "enslavement." By the logic of Valls and others, it is the duty of the French state to emancipate Muslim women from the clutches of their religion but also from themselves.

But after the recent terrorist attack in Nice, when a Tunisian resident of the city killed 85 and injured hundreds more in a truck attack on Bastille Day, the burkini ban seemed to many critics to have a particularly reactionary bent. For a growing number, the burkini represented, in the words of former President Nicolas Sarkozy, a "provocation."

Nice outlawed the bathing suit because it "overtly manifests adherence to a religion at a time when France and places of worship are the target of terrorist attacks."

Nice was notably the scene of an incident Tuesday when a number of French police officers, armed with weapons, surrounding a Muslim woman, demanding that she forcibly remove her clothing in public view.

The court struck down both arguments: It ruled that the burkini is now neither an insult to the equality of women nor a harbinger of terrorism. The attempts to ban it, the judges maintained, insulted "fundamental freedoms" such as the "freedom to come and go, the freedom of conscience and personal liberty."