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Sikhs take turban rights case to
United Nations
WSN Network
 UNITED NATIONS:
The Sikh rights group United Sikhs asked a U.N. human rights
committee last Monday to declare that
France violated
a student's rights by expelling him for wearing a turban and to
recommend repealing the law that led to it.
France passed a
law in 2004 banning children in state primary and secondary schools
from wearing conspicuous religious symbols, including Muslim
headscarves, Jewish yarmulkes, large Christian crosses and Sikh
turbans.
Bikramjit Singh
was 18 when he was expelled from school in
France in 2004
for refusing to remove his turban, according to a group called
United Sikhs, which held a civil rights Conference in
New York
near the United Nations on Monday.
Stephen Grosz, a
lawyer for the group, said United Sikhs had filed an official
communication with a General Assembly committee dealing with human
rights about Singh and two other Sikhs who have been unable to renew
French identity documents because they refused to remove their
turbans for photographs.
"What we're
asking the committee to do is to find that the French state has
violated Bikramjit Singh's rights and to recommend that measures be
taken to rectify the decision," Grosz said on a conference call from
London.
"That
effectively would mean a repeal of the law and its replacement by
something else," he said.
The rights
committee passes only non-binding motions or recommendations which
carry only moral weight.
One of the other
cases was already brought to the European Court of Human Rights,
where it was dismissed last month.
Shingara Mann
Singh, 52, a French national, lost a series of appeals in
France
against the refusal by authorities to issue a new driving license
with a photograph of him wearing a turban, before taking his case to
the Strasbourg-based court.
In the third
case, pensioner Ranjit Singh was unable to access health care since
2002 because French authorities would not renew his residence card
unless he removed his turban for a photograph, United Sikhs said.
Mejindarpal Kaur,
legal director of the group, said the cases were being brought to
the U.N. committee under the terms of the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights, to which
France is a
signatory.
She said the
appeal to the committee was not about the three men in question but
about "25 million Sikhs' right to wear a turban."
Kaur said it was
unclear how long it might take for the committee to decide whether
to discuss the cases or to reach a conclusion.
A spokesman for
the French mission to the United Nations said he had no comment on
the issue.
17 December
2008
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