Burkini protest lands French swimmers fines, pool expulsions

Members of the “Alliance Citoyenne” association gather at the Jean Bron municipal swimming pool in Grenoble at a previous protest in 2019. (Jean-Pierre Clatot/AFP via Getty Images)

• France’s millions of Muslim women are banned from wearing full-body covering swimsuits in many public pools, beaches
• Critics of the ban say it is discriminatory, serves no material purpose

LONDON: Six women have been expelled from a swimming pool in the French city of Grenoble and fined for wearing “burkini” full-body bathing suits.
They wore the suits in a protest against anti-Muslim discrimination in France. The women were among a group of 30 from Citizen Alliance, an activist group that staged the protest in order to push Grenoble’s Mayor Eric Piolle to lift a ban on the burkini in public pools.
Burkinis are banned in most French public pools and on some beaches for reasons of hygiene, but civil rights activists have criticized the ban as discriminatory and Islamophobic.
Men are also subject to clothing restrictions; they are barred from wearing shorts and must instead wear tighter trunks.
One of the Grenoble pool protesters, Naima, said it was the first time that she had bathed in a public pool for 10 years.
“It was 20 minutes of happiness. People applauded when we went into the water with our covering swimsuits,” she added.
Annabelle Bretton, a deputy mayor of Grenoble, said she had met the protesters and told them that the city will continue to require compliance with the hygiene rules. “They want us to change but it’s not on the agenda,” she added.
The burkini issue pertains to a wider debate in French society over the public expression of religion, in particular for France’s millions of Muslims, who make up around 9 percent of the population, according to research conducted by Pew in 2017.
The debate follows announcements by President Emmanuel Macron earlier this year that he would seek to curb Muslim “separatism” in French society, which he said is antithetical to the values of the secular republic.
Piolle has written to Macron requesting national guidelines for what is acceptable swimwear. The mayor asked the government to “set all the criteria to be used for banning swimwear, including size, material and the surface in contact with the water.”
French public opinion strongly supports a ban on the Muslim swimwear, polls suggest, but Citizen Alliance notes that covering swimsuits are allowed in Rennes, capital of the French region of Brittany, and in public pools in Germany, Britain, Italy and Norway.
They also pointed to a ruling by the deputy national ombudsman, George Pau-Langevin, that found banning the swimwear amounts to discrimination. 
“Since they are designed for bathing, neither the security nor the hygiene of bathers appear on the face of it to be threatened,” Pau-Langevin said.