Students at a vocational secondary school in the Belgian city of Ghent have filed a lawsuit challenging a headscarf ban that provincial schools across East Flanders plan to enforce next academic year, the public broadcaster VRT reported Friday.
The ban, approved by the East Flanders provincial government, will prohibit students in provincial secondary schools from wearing headscarves on school premises.
Students from the Richtpunt campus argue that the measure disproportionately affects Muslim girls and violates their fundamental rights.
As minors do not have the legal capacity to initiate proceedings themselves, they are being represented in court by the citizens’ initiative “My School, My Choice,” with several civil society organizations having joined the case in support.
“A headscarf ban isn’t a neutral measure, but a decision that, in practice, leads to the structural exclusion of Muslim girls from education … They are forced to choose between education and identity,” said Nadia El Omari of My School, My Choice.
El Omari argued that the debate surrounding such bans has focused specifically on the visibility of Muslim girls in education rather than on religious symbols in general.
“Schools that implement such bans don’t realistically reflect today’s diverse society,” she said, adding that limiting visible diversity in schools risks undermining dialogue, equality and pluralism among young people.
According to the initiative, attempts over recent months to engage in dialogue with political representatives and policymakers failed to produce a compromise, prompting the decision to pursue legal action.
Mohamed Amin Chaib, chairman of Muslim Rights Watch Belgium, described the case as symbolic, arguing that similar headscarf bans in other Flemish educational institutions could also be challenged on human rights grounds.
