Austrian schoolgirls will be barred from wearing head scarves in class once the next school year starts in September, after the Austrian Parliament passed a law about the practice this week.
Children under 14 will not be allowed to wear a veil while in lessons and at recesses, though the ban will not cover class trips outside school grounds. The parents of children who repeatedly flout the ban will face fines of 150 to 800 euros, or roughly $175 to $940.
The law has long been a goal for Austria’s nationalist right, but it was passed by Austria’s centrist governing coalition after a rise in popular support for the measure. Decades of immigration to Austria have led to a fractious national debate about Austrian identity and the role of Islam in public life, echoing similar societal disputes across the continent.
The law could still be struck down by the country’s highest court, which overturned a similar ban five years ago.
The government presented the new measure as an attempt to protect children’s rights. It predicted that roughly 12,000 girls would be affected by the change.
“A head scarf on an 11-year-old girl is and remains a sign of oppression,” said Claudia Plakolm, Austria’s integration minister, during a press briefing in Vienna last month. “Girls develop feelings of shame, they get a distorted body image, unstable self-esteem,” she added.
The Islamic Faith Community of Austria, an association representing Austrian Muslims, announced that it would challenge the law in court.
“No child should be forced to wear a head scarf; that is nonnegotiable for us. But at the same time, no child should be prevented by state bans from voluntarily living their religious identity,” Ümit Vural, the president of the association, said in a statement.
A similar law that banned head scarves in elementary schools was passed in 2019 by a coalition of mainstream conservatives and far-right allies. It was overturned by the country’s top judges on the basis that singled out Muslim students.
But the creators of the new law say that their legislation may survive judicial review because its wording focuses on the protection of minors rather than religion.
The Freedom Party of Austria, a far-right opposition group that long pushed for the ban, said the new law did not go far enough.
“The head scarf is a symbol of political Islam, the oppression and paternalism of women and therefore has no place in our schools,” Ricarda Berger, a member of Parliament and the party’s spokeswoman on families, said in a statement last month.
Judith Kohlenberger, who studies and writes about migration and integration at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, said the law might undercut integration by driving some parents to school their children at home or demand they skip optional classes. “There is a concern that this political measure could have the opposite effect, namely more segregation,” Professor Kohlenberger said in an interview.
The proportion of Muslims in the Austrian population has grown since refugees from Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina fled the Balkan wars of the 1990s. It increased again after refugees from Syria and Afghanistan settled in Austria about a decade ago. Muslims now make up more than 8 percent of the Austrian population, second only to Roman Catholics.
France is the only other European country to ban head scarves, though Denmark, Belgium and others have laws banning full face coverings. Germany has a patchwork of laws that regulate head scarves for teachers, though the regulations differ by area.
Christopher F. Schuetze is a reporter for The Times based in Berlin, covering politics, society and culture in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
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