「アバヤ」着た娘の登校認められず校長脅迫、男逮捕　仏

【クレルモンフェラン（フランス）ＡＦＰ＝時事】フランス警察は８日、イスラム教徒の服「アバヤ」を着用した娘の登校を認めなかったとして校長を脅迫した容疑で、男を逮捕したと明らかにした。（写真はフランス・ナントで、アバヤを着た女性〈中央・資料写真〉）
　エマニュエル・マクロン政権は先月、教育の場における世俗主義の規則に反するとして、学校でのアバヤ着用禁止を発表した。
　ドミニク・プエシュマイユ検事は、７日に逮捕された男について、「公人を脅迫」した容疑で訴追しているとＡＦＰに語った。
　警察によると、アバヤを着用していた娘は７日、通っている高校の校門で呼び止められ、アバヤを脱ぐよう命じられた。着替えを拒否したところ、登校を認められなかったという。
　男は学校に電話をかけて警備員とスクールカウンセラーと話し、それぞれとの会話の中で校長を標的にした殺害予告を行ったとされる。
　ガブリエル・アタル国民教育相は「言語道断だ」と非難した。校長は現在、警察の保護下にあるという。
　オーベルニュローヌアルプ地域圏のローラン・ボキエ議長は、校長が「殺害と斬首」を予告されたと説明している。【翻訳編集ＡＦＰＢＢＮｅｗｓ】
〔ＡＦＰ＝時事〕（2023/09/12-17:10）

French police said they were holding a man on Friday for threatening a school principal who turned away his daughter for wearing a traditional Muslim abaya robe.
President Emmanuel Macron's government announced last month it was banning the abaya -- a garment worn by Muslim women that covers the body from the neck to the feet -- in schools, as it broke the rules on secularism in education.
The man, arrested Thursday, was being prosecuted for issuing threats designed to intimidate a person charged with an official mission, the local prosecutor Dominique Puechmaille told AFP.
The man's daughter was stopped at the entrance of her high school on Thursday and asked to remove her abaya. When she refused, she was stopped from entering, police said.
Her father then telephoned the school and spoke first to a guard and then to an educational advisor. He is accused of having issued death threats targeting the school principal in both conversations.
French Education Minister Gabriel Attal called the threats intolerable and unspeakable.
The principal was now under police protection, he said.
The president of the Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes region, Laurent Wauquiez, added that the school staff had received threats of death and decapitation.
The authorities had to show firmness and determination in the face of such threats.
- Court rejected challenge -
The ban was quickly challenged before France's State Council, the highest administrative court, by an association arguing it could incite hatred against Muslims and racial profiling.
On Thursday however, the court threw out the complaint.
Wearing the abaya follows the logic of religious affirmation, said the ruling, adding that the decision was based on French law, which does not allow anyone wearing visible signs of any religious affiliation in schools.
The government ban did not, it said, cause serious or obviously illegal harm to the respect for personal lives, freedom of religion, the right to education, the well-being of children or the principle of non-discrimination.
A US government advisory panel on Friday condemned France's ban, saying the restriction was meant to intimidate the country's Muslim minority.
The US Commission on International Religious Freedom is tasked with making recommendations to the US government but does not set policy itself.
The commission's chair, Abraham Cooper, called the abaya ban a misguided effort to promote the French value of laicite, the country's official secularism.
France continues to wield a specific interpretation of secularism to target and intimidate religious groups, particularly Muslims, Cooper said.
While no government should use its authority to impose a specific religion on its population, it is equally condemnable to restrict the peaceful practice of individuals' religious beliefs to promote secularism.
On the first day of the school year on Monday, French schools sent dozens of girls home for refusing to remove their abayas.
Nearly 300 schoolgirls defied the ban on that day, Attal said. Most agreed to change garments but 67 refused and were sent home, he said.
Around 10 percent of France's 67 million inhabitants are Muslim, according to official estimates.
Most have origins in northern African nations Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, which were French colonies until the second half of the 20th century.
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