The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) did not make a decision on Thursday regarding the case of two Belgian women who believe that a police regulation prohibiting them from going swimming in a burkini constitutes religious discrimination.
The ECHR's decision was made because the Court of Cassation – Belgium's main court of last instance – has not ruled on the case of the two women from Antwerp. They have therefore not exhausted all internal legal remedies. However, taking the case through all available courts in their own country is a necessary condition for approaching the ECHR, making the case inadmissible.
The two Muslim women, now in their 30s, were denied access to a public swimming pool in Antwerp in 2017 on the basis of police regulations for wearing full-length swimming costumes.
In September 2017, they challenged this regulation in the Antwerp Court of First Instance, but their application was rejected the following year. They appealed, but again were unsuccessful. Subsequently, a lawyer at the Court of Cassation considered that an appeal at this level had little chance of success, and the applicants did not appeal to the Court any further.
The ECHR found this justification insufficient. It noted that the Court of Cassation "had never ruled on the legality of a judicial decision on the question of wearing the burkini in a public swimming pool," even though there appears to be "divergent case law on the matter" in Belgium.
