Belgian courts adopted France’s framing of the hijab as outside religious freedom

Evidence

In June 2019, the Belgian Constitutional Court ruled that public institutions, including colleges and universities, could prohibit the wearing of religious symbols without violating the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) mandate of free exercise of religion. … With the ruling, the Belgian court endorsed what the French National Assembly had established fifteen years earlier. It held that the hijab was a deviant mode of expression and a cultural practice that fell outside the bounds of religious freedom. The court, acting on a continent where nativist populism was spiking and the French plague spreading, viewed Muslim bodies—principally through the hijab—as the embodiment of a rival civilization bent on changing western Europe, and conspiring to remake it in its image. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 829

Categorization

• QUESTION: The ECHR mandate interpretation is striking — worth checking whether the European Court itself has since contradicted the Belgian court’s reading.
• SEED: Could support an essay on how national courts across Europe independently converge on the same dehumanizing legal framing of Muslim dress through citation of French precedent.