France’s top court overturns burkini ban

France’s top administrative court on Friday overturned a ban on burkinis in a Mediterranean beach resort, effectively meaning that towns can no longer issue bans on the swimsuits that have divided the country and brought world attention to its fraught relationship with Muslims.

The ruling by the Council of State specifically concerns a ban on the Muslim garment in the Riviera town of Villeneuve-Loubet, but the binding decision is expected to impact all the 30 or so French resort municipalities that have issued similar decrees.

The bans grew increasingly controversial as images circulated online of some Muslim women being ordered to remove body-concealing garments on French Riviera beaches.

Lawyers for a human rights group and a Muslim collective challenged the legality of the ban to the top court, saying the orders infringe basic freedoms and that mayors have overstepped their powers by telling women what to wear on beaches.

Mayors had cited multiple reasons for the bans, including security after a string of Islamic extremist attacks, risk to public order, and France’s strict rules on secularism in public life.

The Council of State ruled that, “The emotion and concerns arising from the terrorist attacks, notably the one perpetrated in Nice on July 14, cannot suffice to justify in law the contested prohibition measure.”

“It is a decision that is meant to set legal precedent,” Spinosi said to reporters earlier outside the court. “Today all the ordinances taken should conform to the decision of the Council of State. Logically the mayors should withdraw these ordinances. If not, legal actions could be taken” against those towns.

The head of the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, the other group that appealed to the top court, hailed the decision but lamented that the crackdown “will remain engraved in the history of our country.”

Technically, other local bans are still in effect until mayors revoke them by themselves or groups contest them to courts. But, de facto, the town decrees have been emptied from effectiveness since any women who would now be fined for refusing to remove their religious garments would be able to contest the move in court.

Nevertheless, the mayor of the Corsican town of Sisco said he wouldn’t lift the ban he imposed after an Aug. 13 clash on a beach. “Here the tension is very, very, very high and I won’t withdraw it,” Ange-Pierre Vivoni said on BFM-TV.

Former President Nicolas Sarkozy, who announced this week he’s seeking the conservative nomination for the 2017 race, said at a rally Thursday night in southern France that he wants a law banning the burkini “on the entire territory of the Republic.”

National Front leader Marine Le Pen said the ruling is “not surprising” but the battle is not over. She said in a statement that lawmakers must vote “as quickly as possible” to extend a 2004 law that bans Muslim headscarves and other ostentatious religious symbols in classrooms to include all public spaces.

“The burkini would obviously be part of it,” said the statement by France’s far right leader, who is running for president in the 2017 race.

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