Half of Luxembourg’s Muslims said they experienced racism in the last year, and 60% in the past five years, according to a report by the European Agency for Fundamental Rights.

The report, released Thursday and based on data collected in 2021 and 2022, points out that all respondents to the survey in the Grand Duchy came from countries south of the Sahara, noting that discrimination based on skin color is also the key driver of racism in Luxembourg, the report said.

Almost four in ten Muslims in France and 53% in Belgium said they had experienced racism in the last five years. Muslims living in Austria and Germany claim to be particularly affected by discrimination, with 71% and 68% respectively saying they had experienced at least one act of discrimination in the last five years.

“It is increasingly difficult to be a Muslim in Europe,” the report based on a survey of 9,600 people in 13 EU member states said.

Half of European Muslims questioned said they confronted racism in their daily lives, compared with 39% in 2016, the year of the previous study.

Multiple difficulties

A quarter of the Muslims living in Luxembourg claim to have been discriminated against when renting or buying property. When it comes to healthcare, 28% of Muslims in Luxembourg reported discrimination over the last five years, putting the Grand Duchy behind only Austria (45%) and Germany (31%) in this category.

More than a third of Muslims in Luxembourg say they experienced harassment – 35% said they had been insulted, while 5% experienced physical violence. Half of Luxembourg Muslims believe their last police stop was due to racial profiling.

Confidence in the police is significantly lower among those who say they have been victims of racism (6.1/10) compared to those who have never been discriminated against (8.6/10).

These figures appear to be consistent with those of the Observatoire de l’Islamophobie au Luxembourg (OIL). In 2023, 23% of the 299 Muslims surveyed by the OIL said they had been direct victims of Islamophobic incidents, while 1% said they had been victims of violence because of their faith.

Measures for action

The EU should focus on racism against Muslims, which is “exacerbated by dehumanizing rhetoric across the continent”, rights agency president Sirpa Rautio said. Muslims are the EU’s second-largest religious group at 26 million, or 5% of the total population.

To improve the situation in Luxembourg, but more broadly at European level, the rights agency recommended strengthening anti-discrimination laws.

The agency also advised EU member states to introduce national action plans to combat racism. Luxembourg has already implemented this recommendation.

The agency also recommends targeted aid to improve the living conditions of Muslims, as well as their improved access to education and employment. Such measures also would improve access to affordable housing and reduce the school drop-out rate.

Source: Luxembourg Times

The wearing of the hijab has divided Europe for years and the issue came before the courts again in Belgium, after an employee of the eastern municipality of Ans was told she could not wear one while at work.

Lawyers for the woman, who performs her duties as head of office primarily without being in contact with users of the public service, argued that her right to freedom of religion had been infringed.

The Ans municipality changed its terms of employment to require its workers to observe strict neutrality by not wearing overt signs of religious or ideological belief after the woman was told not to wear a headscarf.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) said authorities in member states had a margin of discretion in designing the neutrality of public service they intended to promote.

However, this objective must be pursued in a “consistent and systematic manner” and measures must be limited to what is strictly necessary. It was for a national court to verify that these requirements are complied with.

The CJEU ruled for the first time on women’s wearing of the headscarf in 2017, when the Luxembourg court found that the garments could be banned, but only as part of a general policy barring all religious and political symbols.

The judgment also stipulated that customers could simply not demand that workers remove headscarves if the company they were working for had no policy barring religious symbols.

The court has found in favor of banning headscarves on a number of occasions since then. In 2021 it threw out cases brought by two German Muslim women, a special needs childcare worker and a sales assistant in a chemist, both of whom were told to remove their headscarves after deciding to wear the garments on their return to work after parental leave.

The ban on religious and political symbols can be justified by the “employer’s desire to pursue a policy of political, philosophical and religious neutrality with regard to its customers or users, in order to take account of their legitimate wishes”, the court said in a statement at the time.

Critics have described the bans as attacks on religious freedoms that predominantly affect women. Human Rights Watch, the NGO, said bans on religious clothing and symbols for teachers and other civil servants in Germany led some Muslim women to give up teaching careers.

The ban on face coverings in France, meanwhile, led to fines for nearly 600 Muslim women in less than three years and France’s 2004 law banning the wearing of headscarves in schools kept some Muslim girls from finishing school.

In the UK there are no bans on headscarves or other religious symbols.

Continue reading at: The Independent