By UN experts found disproportionate and discriminatory the decisions of the French football and basketball federations to exclude players wearing the hijab from competitions.
On Monday, United Nations experts invited France to lift “discriminatory measures prohibiting women and girls who choose to wear the hijab from participating in sports.”
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This call has been made in a statement issued on Monday by UN experts from the “Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council” of the United Nation, as reported by Anadolu.
According to the media outlet, the UN experts regretted in their statement that “the decisions of the French football and basketball federations to exclude players wearing the hijab from competitions, including at the amateur level, as well as the decision of the French Government to prevent French athletes wearing the hijab from representing the country at the Paris Olympic Games, are disproportionate and discriminatory, and violate their rights to freely manifest their identity, religion or belief in private and in public, and to take part in cultural life.”
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For the experts, “Muslim girls and women who wear the hijab must have equal rights to participate in cultural and sporting life, and to take part in all aspects of French society of which they are a part,” Anadolu added.
Furthermore,the report put it that “the neutrality and secularism of the State are not legitimate grounds for imposing restrictions on the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of religion or belief.”
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“Any limitation on these freedoms must be proportionate, necessary to achieve one of the objectives set out in international law (security, order and public health, rights of others), and justified by facts that can be demonstrated, and not by presumptions, hypotheses or prejudices,” the UN experts add.
During the Paris 2024 Olympic Games (July 26 – August 11), France had banned veiled women from representing France at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games (July 26 – August 11) under the pretext of respecting secularism.
