A French woman, wearing a burqini similar to this, has been told the swimsuit breaches hygiene rules.
A Paris swimming pool has refused entry to a young Muslim woman wearing a burqini, a swimsuit that covers most of the body.
The pool ban came as French lawmakers conduct hearings on whether to ban the burqa after President Nicolas Sarkozy said the head-to-toe veil was “not welcome” in secular France.
Officials in the Paris suburb of Emerainville said they let the woman swim in the pool in July wearing the burqini, designed for Muslim women who want to swim without revealing their bodies.
But when she returned in August they decided to apply hygiene rules and told her she could not swim if she insisted on wearing the garment, which resembles a wetsuit with built-in hood.
Pool staff “reminded her of the rules that apply in all (public) swimming pools which forbid swimming while clothed”, said Daniel Guillaume, an official with the organisation that manages pools in the area.
Le Parisien newspaper said the woman, identified only by her first name Carole, was a French convert to Islam and that she was determined to go to the courts to challenge the decision.
“Quite simply, this is segregation,” the paper quoted her as saying. “I will fight to try to change things. And if I see that the battle is lost, I cannot rule out leaving France.”
Local mayor Alain Kelyor said “all this has nothing to do with Islam”, adding that the burqini was “not an Islamic swimsuit, that type of suit does not exist in the Koran”, the Muslim holy book.
France, home to Europe’s biggest Muslim minority, has set up a special panel of 32 lawmakers to consider whether a law should be enacted to bar Muslim women from wearing the full veil, known as a burqa or niqab.
The country has had a long-running debate on how far it is willing to go to accommodate Islam without undermining the tradition of separating church and state, enshrined in a flagship 1905 law.
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Source: AFP
