The Court of Appeal of Versailles has annulled Thursday the dismissal in 2009 of an engineer of the company Micropole who had refused to remove his Islamic veil, following a judgment of the Court of Cassation which had itself questioned the European justice in this file. The court declared the dismissal null and condemned the company Micropole to pay 15,234 euros as compensation to his former employee, said a judicial source. This decision is the culmination of a lengthy procedure that has involved the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the highest French court.
A long court battle
The employee concerned was a study engineer who wore the headscarf when she was hired in 2008. A company she was working on had demanded that she no longer wear it during their meetings. She had refused, before being dismissed in June 2009. The employee had decided to contest his dismissal in court: the labor courts, then the court of appeal had validated it, judging it based "on a real cause and serious ". The case then went to the Court of Cassation, which initially appealed to the CJEU.
On 14 March 2017, seized of this case and a Belgian case, the CJEU considered that the internal regulation of a company can, under certain conditions, provide for the prohibition of the visible wearing of religious or political signs like the Islamic headscarf , by employees in contact with customers. However, in the Micropole case, the ECJ ruled that, in the absence of an internal rule on neutrality, the company could not justify the dismissal.
This argument was echoed by the Court of Cassation, which, on 23 November 2017, found the "oral" order given to the employee "against a particular religious sign" to be discriminatory. The court had overturned the judgment validating the dismissal and referred the case to the Court of Appeal of Versailles, which pronounced Thursday after a hearing in February. The reasons for this judgment were not known in the immediate future.