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Canada: Quebec court hears movement to suspend secular Bill 21

SHAFAQNA- A court in Quebec is thinking of a movement that seeks to suspend the application of a regulation that prohibits some general public-sector workers in the Canadian province to wear religious symbols on the task.

The Quebec Court of Appeal heard the request for a stay on Bill 21, as the law is widely known, on Tuesday.

Bill 21 bars public-sector employees in positions of authority – such as schoolteachers and principals, prosecutors and police officers – from wearing religious symbols in the workplace.

The groups lost an try to suspend the law’s application in Quebec Remarkable Court docket in July, but they were being presented a prospect to charm that conclusion, gotechdaily told. But rights groups and civil liberty advocates throughout Canada say the law unfairly down sides religious minorities and targets Muslim gals, in unique.

The Quebec authorities has defended Monthly bill 21, expressing it seeks to enshrine the importance of condition secularism in provincial regulation – a principle recognized as laicite in French.

“We are standing against second-class citizenship,” said Mustafa Farooq, executive director of the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM), on the steps outside the Montreal court before the hearing, according to aljazeera.

Opponents argue Quebec’s Bill 21 affects women more than men and is unconstitutional.

Lawyer Olga Redko argued Bill 21 violates the sexual equality guarantees in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms — which are not shielded by the notwithstanding clause that the province has invoked to avoid court challenges, montreal reported.

Virtually all the people affected by the law so far are women teachers who can’t find work because they wear the Islamic head scarf, Redko told the three-judge Quebec Court of Appeal panel. “This law was applied … and the impact is overwhelmingly — if not exclusively — on women.”

To get around that restriction, the teams prior to the Quebec Courtroom of Attractiveness have argued the law is imprecise, encroaches on federal jurisdiction, and stops citizens from collaborating in democratic establishments, the Canadian Press reported.