UN criticizes French move to bar Olympians from wearing headscarves

When asked about the decision during a news conference Tuesday in Geneva, a spokeswoman for the U.N. human rights office said, “No one should impose on a woman what she needs to wear or not wear.”

“Discriminatory practices against a group can have harmful consequences,” Marta Hurtado said, noting that under international human rights law, “restrictions of expressions of religions or beliefs” are “only acceptable under really specific circumstances,” such as public health or safety.

French Sports Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra told a news program Sunday that those competing for France in the Olympics next year would not be permitted to wear hijabs at the event.

The government’s “regime of strict secularism” is “strictly applied to the field of sport,” Oudéa-Castéra said, according to French media.

The Olympic restriction echoes the French soccer federation’s ban on hijabs, which the French Council of State upheld in June.

Critics have condemned these policies as discriminatory and say they foment Islamophobia, while the government has defended them as critical to maintaining national unity and curbing perceived threats of religious influence on society.

When the Summer Olympics return to France for the first time in a century in July, they will offer an international stage for the country to project its identity to the world, an identity that the government is increasingly defining by the principles of secularism.

In response to a French bill that would have banned hijabs at all sporting events but failed to pass last year, Ibtihaj Muhammad, a fencer and the first Muslim American woman to wear a hijab while competing at the Olympics, wrote on Instagram that “every woman should have the choice to wear what she wants and the opportunity to play sports, regardless of her faith.”

“Challenging us on hijab only strengthens our resolve to wear it,” she said.