Headscarves and the Wrong Balance

To date, the CJEU has decided 6 cases concerning women who wanted to wear a headscarf at work. All judgments suggest that considerations of neutrality can trump religious freedom. Although the CJEU made some general and abstract comments about the importance of freedom of religion, it did not really address what the bans, in practice, meant for the individual women involved, neither did engage with the possibility that these neutrality rules could constitute sex, race and/or intersectional discrimination. The CJEU thus provide little protection for the rights of headscarf wearing Muslim women.