Paris’s mayor may be celebrating the city’s readiness to host the Olympics next week by swimming in the formerly E. coli–infested Seine, but not everyone is impressed with the host city. On Tuesday, Amnesty International called France’s refusal to allow its athletes to wear hijabs while competing in the Games discriminatory and hypocritical.
“French authorities made it emphatically and unashamedly clear … that their proclaimed efforts at improving gender equality and inclusivity in sports do not apply to one group of women and girls — those Muslim women and girls who wear religious head coverings,” a new report from Amnesty International says.
In September, France’s sports minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, said the country’s secularism principle and its rules against showing religious symbols during sporting events would be upheld for athletes competing for France during the Olympics. “That means the prohibition of any type of proselytising and the absolute neutrality of the public service,” Oudéa-Castéra said. “Which means that the representatives of our delegations, in our French teams, will not wear the headscarf.” France has banned women and girls from wearing headscarves in public schools since 2004.
The United Nations quickly criticized the ban, saying, “No one should impose on a woman what she needs to wear, or not wear,” per The Guardian. The French Sports Ministry clarified that athletes could wear hijabs in the Olympic village but not while competing. In addition to hijabs, athletes are prohibited from wearing “any other accessory or garment expressing their religious affiliation when representing France in a national or international sporting competition.” Athletes for other countries have to follow rules set by their own federations and the International Olympic Committee.
Though several human-rights organizations wrote a letter to French authorities last month asking them to reconsider, the rule still stands. It’s hard to ignore the irony of France not allowing its athletes to wear hijabs during the year the Games are being touted as the “Gender Equal Olympics” by the IOC, the World Economic Forum, and France itself because there will be a 50 percent participation rate between men and women.
Anna Błuś, Amnesty International’s women’s-rights researcher in Europe, put it plainly in Tuesday’s report: “Banning French athletes from competing with sports hijabs at the Olympic and Paralympic Games makes a mockery of claims that Paris 2024 is the first Gender Equal Olympics and lays bare the racist gender discrimination that underpins access to sport in France.”
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