A company may forbid political or religious symbols if it wants to convey an image of neutrality or avoid social conflicts – the European Court of Justice has ruled in two cases from Germany.
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has strengthened the rights of employers who want to prohibit Muslim employees from wearing headscarves. The ban on wearing any visible form of expression of political, ideological or religious convictions could be justified by the employer’s need to convey an image of neutrality to customers or to avoid social conflicts, the ECJ ruled on Thursday. The ruling was based on two cases from Germany.
In one case, a Muslim employee at a non-denominational daycare center received several warnings for coming to work wearing a headscarf. Negotiations were then made before the Hamburg Labor Court as to whether the entries had to be deleted from the personnel file. The court asked the ECJ for an opinion. The Federal Labor Court took a similar approach in 2019 with the case of a Muslim woman from the Nuremberg area who had sued against a headscarf ban at the Müller drugstore chain. While the employee saw her religious freedom restricted, the drugstore chain referred to entrepreneurial freedom.
A previous opinion by the Court of Justice on the cases argued that an employer need not take an all-or-nothing position. It is legitimate to forbid large religious or political symbols with reference to a neutral dress code, but to exclude small symbols “that are not noticed at first glance”. The reports are not binding for the judges in their decision.
The final judgment in the specific case of the daycare worker and the drug store employee must now be made by the competent German courts. The ECJ emphasized on Thursday that they certainly have room for maneuver. Thus, the national courts could, in the context of balancing the rights and interests in question, take into account the context of their respective Member States. This is particularly the case if there are more favorable national regulations with regard to the protection of religious freedom.
In 2017, the ECJ made headlines in a similar case with a much-noticed ruling. At that time, the top judges of the EU spoke out in favor of employing a headscarf in certain circumstances, for example if ideological signs were generally prohibited in the company and there were objective reasons for this.