Top EU Court Sets Limits on Workplace Head-Scarf Ban

BRUSSELS—The European Union’s leading court docket mentioned Thursday that employers may ban the wearing of head scarves and other religious symbols but set out disorders on when such prohibitions comply with the bloc’s antidiscrimination laws.

The ruling arrives amid intensifying debate in Europe over racism and the security of minority legal rights following a surge of anti-immigrant functions over recent years. Policies over donning head scarves, which vary widely across the bloc, have appear to symbolize controversy over calls to combine Europe’s Muslim populace.

French President Emmanuel Macron and other French authorities have increasingly sought to curtail the exhibit of religious symbols amid a marketing campaign to assert the country’s secular point out.

In the meantime, following prevalent antiracism protests in the U.S. immediately after the killing of George Floyd, there have been growing calls in some Western European nations around the world to press back again towards discrimination and racism.

Judges of the Luxembourg-based mostly European Court docket of Justice in their ruling Thursday upheld a 2017 choice by the court docket stating that a personal company’s choice to ban the donning of a head scarf to market a neutral performing environment wasn’t necessarily discriminatory.