The ruling handed down by the top EU court concerns the case of two Muslim women in Germany who took their respective employers to court after being told not to wear their headscarves, which many observant Muslim women see as a key element of their faith. The ECJ confirmed that such a ban was permissible under EU law provided that it was applied in a uniform way to all religious beliefs. For example, a Christian could also be asked to remove a cross necklace. However, employers wishing to enforce such rules on their staff must have a genuine “need to present a neutral image towards customers or to prevent social disputes,” a court press release stated. Moreover, such a decision must be proportional and strike a balance with the rights and interests of people involved, and take account of the context in each EU member state, which may well have more generous allowances for religious freedom, the statement continued. The ruling will now return to German courts for final decisions on the two cases based on Thursday’s guidance on EU law from the Luxembourg-based judges. In the first case, a Muslim employee of an interdenominational day-care centre had been given several warnings because she had come to work wearing a headscarf. The Hamburg Labour Court then heard a case on whether those entries must be deleted from her personnel file. The court turned to the ECJ. In the second, the Federal Labour Court took a similar approach in 2019 with the case of a Muslim woman from the Nuremberg area who had filed a complaint against a headscarf ban at the drugstore chain Mueller.