Muslim organisations also among those to decry ruling signed off by mayor David Lisnard outlawing full-body swimsuits

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

A French human rights association and Muslim groups have said they will take legal action against the mayor of Cannes for issuing a decree banning burkinis from the resort’s beaches.

David Lisnard signed off on a ruling last month preventing women from wearing the full-body swimsuits in the Côte d’Azur town. The decree was introduced shortly after the Bastille day attack in Nice in July, where a delivery driver killed 85 people when he ploughed into crowds celebrating the French national holiday on the seafront.

The decree states that Muslim women wearing burkinis could be a threat to public order and will be cautioned and fined €38 (£33).

“Beachwear which ostentatiously displays religious affiliation, when France and places of worship are currently the target of terrorist attacks, is liable to create risks of disrupting public order (crowds, scuffles etc), which it is necessary to prevent,” it says.

Thierry Migoule, the head of Cannes municipal services, said: “We are not talking about banning the wearing of religious symbols on the beach ... but ostentatious clothing which refers to an allegiance to terrorist movements which are at war with us.”

Lawyers, human rights groups and Muslim associations have described the decree as illegal and preposterous.

In a statement, Hervé Lavisse from the Cannes-Grasse section of the French Human Rights League said: “This is an abuse of law and we will take it to court.”

Rightwing politicians needed to calm their “discriminatory fervour and defend the spirit of the republic,” he said.

France has some of the toughest legislation on headscarves in Europe, including a law passed in 2004 on religious symbols that bans girls from wearing the hijab in state schools, but no current laws ban anyone from wearing a headscarf or full-body bikini at a public beach. Wearing a burkini remains legal in France as a whole.

The niqab, or full-face veil, was banned in all public spaces in 2011 by the former president Nicolas Sarkozy as part of a law against anyone covering their face in public. But a burkini, which covers the head and body for swimming while leaving the face uncovered, does not contravene that law.

State workers must by law be impartial and neutral, and so cannot show their religious belief with an outward symbol such as a headscarf, but this applies only to public service workplaces such as hospitals and town halls.

“Wearing a burkini, headscarf, G-string or feather cabaret costume is not banned by the law,” tweeted Feiza Ben Mohamed of the Federation of Muslims in the South. She said the organisation, based in Nice, had lodged court papers with the intention of annulling the decree.

Marwan Muhammad, the executive director of the Collective against Islamophobia in France, said he would go to court to get the decree scrapped. His organisation succeeded in legal action in 2014 to overturn a mayoral decree seeking to ban headscarves and religious symbols from summer events in Wissous, near Paris.

France's headscarf war: 'It's an attack on freedom' Read more

Serge Slama, a public law lecturer at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense told France Inter radio that the decree had no legal basis and was merely a “political message ... tinted with Islamophobia, racism and anti-religious feeling”.

Questioned by newspaper Nice-Matin, Lisnard, of the centre-right Les Républicains party, said: “I don’t have time for controversies ... I’m simply banning a uniform that is the symbol of Islamist extremism.”

Lionnel Luca, another hardline member of Sarkozy’s Les Républicains, signed a similar decree banning burkinis in the nearby area of Villeneuve-Loubet.

Islamic head coverings have long been a highly contentious political issue in France. In the run-up to the 2017 presidential and parliamentary elections, the topic is increasingly being raised, not least by Sarkozy, who this week insisted that Muslim headscarves should be banned from universities and in private companies.