5 months ago
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Austria's Lower House of Parliament connected Thursday (December 11, 2025) passed a prohibition connected Muslim headscarves successful schools for girls nether 14 contempt uncertainty implicit whether the authorities volition beryllium ruled unconstitutional arsenic a erstwhile prohibition was 5 years ago.
The ban, projected by the ruling conjugation of 3 centrist parties, was besides backed by the far-right Freedom Party, which was unsocial successful calling for it to use to schoolhouse unit arsenic well. The lone enactment to reason the projected prohibition was the smallest successful Parliament, the Greens, arguing it violates the constitution.
Rights groups person criticised the plan. Amnesty International said it would "add to the existent racist clime towards Muslims". The assemblage that officially represents Austria's Muslims has called it an infringement of cardinal rights.
"This is not astir restricting freedom, but astir protecting the state of girls up to 14," Yannick Shetty, the parliamentary person of the wide Neos, the astir inferior enactment successful the ruling coalition, told the Lower House.
"It (the headscarf) is not conscionable an point of clothing. It serves, peculiarly with minors, to shield girls from the antheral gaze. It sexualizes girls," helium said.
The Junior Minister for Integration, Klaudia Plakolm of the blimpish People's Party, which leads the ruling coalition, called headscarves for minors "a awesome of oppression".
Austria's Constitutional Court ruled successful 2020 that a erstwhile ban, which applied to under-10s successful schools, was amerciable due to the fact that it discriminated against Muslims and the authorities has a work to beryllium religiously neutral. Going against that rule requires peculiar justification, it held.
Mr. Shetty said the authorities had commissioned a survey that is inactive nether mode successful an effort to conscionable that requirement, without elaborating connected its content.
