Court: EU court to rule on headscarf ban in German kindergarten, drugstore

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) on Thursday said it plans to rule on two headscarf ban in Germany.

In the first case, a Muslim employee of an interdenominational day-care centre had been given several warnings because she had come to work wearing a headscarf.

The Hamburg Labour Court then heard a case on whether those entries must be deleted from her personnel file.

The court then turned to the ECJ.

The Federal Labour Court took a similar approach in 2019 with the case of a Muslim woman from the Nuremberg area who had filed a complaint against a headscarf ban at the drugstore chain — Mueller.

While the employee felt her religious freedom was restricted, the drugstore chain considered it an entrepreneurial freedom.

A previous expert opinion from the court on the cases had argued that an employer did not have to adopt an all or nothing attitude.

It was legal to prohibit large religious or political symbols by reference to a neutral dress code, not to exempt small symbols that were not noticed at first glance.

However, the expert opinions were not binding for the judges in their decision as the ECJ had already made headlines with a ruling in a similar case in 2017.

At the time, judges from the EU’s highest court ruled that employers could prohibit headscarves in the workplace under certain circumstances, for example if ideological signs were generally prohibited in the company and there were objective reasons for this. (dpa/NAN)