As French legislators wrestle with the thorny idea of banning full facial veils in government offices, public hospitals and aboard public trains and buses, it may comfort them to know that the issue is also causing headaches for officials in Egypt, where a partial ban on the niqab — which covers a woman’s entire face except for her eyes — was overturned last week by a court in Cairo.

A ban on female university students wearing the niqab during examinations, which was imposed by Egypt’s minister of education in October, was declared unconstitutional by Egypt’s High Administrative Court last Wednesday, Reuters reported. According to the court’s ruling:

Freedom to wear the niqab is guaranteed by human rights and constitutional liberties, and a girl’s right to dress the way she sees fit in accordance with her beliefs and her social environment is a firm right that cannot be violated.

A group of female students had asked the court to reverse a lower court ruling in favor of the government earlier this month. The lower court had upheld the ban and suggested that allowing students to take exams with their faces concealed made cheating too easy.

After that earlier court ruling, one student told Al Jazeera that since she would not reveal her face to take her exams, the government was preventing her from getting an education. “They claim we are the ones who are backward and then they ban us from our education,” she said. A lawyer for the students, said the ban had to be overturned because forcing women to reveal their faces “supports rape and sexual harassment.”

Reuters pointed out that a number of students at a Cairo university had skirted the ban by wearing surgical masks during exams this month.

As Al Jazeera explained in October, the niqab ban in Egyptian schools was “aimed at a minority of women, as a vast majority of Egyptian women wear the headscarf only,” and not the full facial veil.