On 22 November France’s highest appeals court handed down its ruling that affirmed the principle whereby an employer can only dismiss an employee who has direct contact with customers whilst wearing a religious symbol, in this case an Islamic headscarf, if the company’s internal regulations include a neutrality clause that bans the visible wearing of all political, philosophical, and religious symbols in the workplace by employees. The Court of Cassation added that an employer must seek an alternative job position that does not involve visual contact with its customers. In this way the court is blending two CJEU judgments from March 2017 on the issue of the wearing of religious symbols.
France’s highest court had asked the CJEU to determine if the wishes of an IT services company client who no longer wished to be attended to by the company’s Islamic headscarf wearing female employee could in fact be considered an essential determining business request and as such allow discrimination based on religious grounds. In a ruling on 14 March 2017 (c.f. article No. 10112) the European court replied ‘No’. On the same day the same court handed down a ruling in a Belgian case (G4S case,
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